The SEC Leaders

Born in Hartford, Connecticut and raised with his seven siblings and twenty plus wards of the State by their working mother and father, "Coach" learned early on the value of hard work, teamwork, and perseverance. While working a part-time job at a local service station, he graduated from high school with a commission to West Point, but a knee injury in his senior year kept him from attending the US Military Academy.

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Coach's academic prowess and leadership abilities aided him in college at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he graduated as class president with a degree in Fine Arts Music Education, with minors in English and Theater. He spent a year in public service (Hartford, CT Model Cities Program) and then moved to Vermont in 1973, at age 23, to start a business: Christie's Quechee Exxon. In Vermont he began coaching in 1980, and teaching in 1986, which coincided with a Master’s in Education Administration from Plymouth State University. Coach’s achievements culminated with a principal/directorship in Randolph, VT, and a doctoral program with all but dissertation in Educational Leadership from Nova Southeastern University. Coach has also volunteered for a variety of charitable causes.

Today, Coach wants to continue serve as your voice in Montpelier. A voice that echoes your concerns. A voice that’s heard. A voice that cares.

ELIZABETH LEPRESTRE CORNELL BURROWS lives in West Windsor. She represents Windsor-1, which in addition to West Windsor, also includes Hartland and Windsor. She shares this responsibility with John Bartholomew of Hartland. Family history in the area dates back to Vermont’s earliest days. She, herself, traveled through most of this country and many others, with Windsor and West Windsor as lifelong grounding points, before settling in Vermont.
As Elizabeth Cornell, she attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin; as a part of her course of studies, Elizabeth wrote an ethnography of the homeless population in Seattle, Washington. Later, Elizabeth pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
Elizabeth lived in Prague for several years, where she worked for a human rights organization focused on the Romani population, and founded Pozor magazine, which covered five countries and was circulated throughout central Europe and in the United States. Her political icons are Vaclav Havel, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela.
Between 1998 and 2008, Elizabeth lived in New York City and Austin, TX, held jobs in a variety of editorial capacities, and served as a hospice volunteer. Also during that decade, she met the man she almost immediately knew she would marry, Justin Burrows. They were married in 2008 in Brownsville, Vermont, and subsequently brought into this world two spirited boys.
Elizabeth has served on the local school board, and has alternated service as chair and member of the new Mount Ascutney School District board each year since its inception. Elizabeth has worked in her own way towards dismantling systemic racism and other exclusionary biases, beginning at our State’s schools. It was a powerful impetus in her running for the State House.
Elizabeth also has a passion for changing the State’s understanding of aging as a phase of life and not as categorically denoting infirmity. Elizabeth celebrates diversity of all sorts for its crucial benefits toward creativity and collaboration, and strives to institutionalize inclusion. She honors beauty and wisdom, tradition and evolution, freedom and unity.

Golrang (Rey) Garofano was born in Iran and immigrated to Los Angeles, California in the mid-1980s to escape the Islamic regime and the Iran-Iraq War. Her career path took her to several large cities in the Northeast before she settled in Vermont in 2005. She has been a public servant for the State of Vermont for 16 years, serving in various leadership roles supporting Vermonters, including the most vulnerable populations. Rey’s public service career has spanned human services, including health care, affordable housing, homelessness, and early childhood education. She currently works at the Child Development Division working on policies that ensure that the youngest Vermonters have access to high-quality early childhood education. Rey also works across the Department for Children and Families (DCF) to build efforts to advance equity and social justice to remove structural barriers and increase meaningful inclusion and representation across DCF. She has a deeply personal commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and has been actively engaged in multiple community projects over the past decade to promote racial equity and inclusion in and around Essex. Rey is an active participant on the Essex Westford School Board (EWSD), serves on the board of Voices for Inclusion in Essex and Westford, and is also on the EWSD Equity Advisory Committee, which is tasked with implementing the board’s equity policy. Her long career as a public servant, her lived experience, and her deep understanding of state government provides her with the perspective needed to work hard on behalf of working families in Essex. Rey’s educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in business management from Champlain College complemented by a certificate in trauma-informed practice from the Child Welfare Partnership at UVM and a certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business. Rey lives with her husband, daughter, and their dog, Tilly.