At age 69, Tom Corbett has racked up decades of experience in Vermont’s food service industry, preparing meals since he was a young teen at restaurants and country clubs, summer camps, and even the Statehouse.
For the past 12 years, Corbett has made his living in the kitchen of Williamstown Middle High School. Better known as Chef Tom, he’d come into school on Sundays to prep from-scratch pizza dough. He baked fresh bread daily and served up an especially kid-pleasing version of mac and cheese. More than anything, though, Corbett — with his bushy beard and bald head — was a friendly and familiar presence in the cafeteria.
This summer, Corbett worked at a camp in Woodbury. He was looking forward to going back to his regular job at the end of August. But on the Friday before school began, he was fired. The decision was made by Genuine Foods, a national company that, in July, took over the district’s school meals operations from the Abbey Group, which was until recently a Vermont-owned company.
The firing has created a stir in this central Vermont community, lovingly called “Billtown” by residents. Hundreds of them have signed a petition urging Genuine to rehire Chef Tom, and the dismissal was debated last week during a Central Vermont Supervisory Union school board meeting. Students, parents and former coworkers have spoken out, saying they’ll miss Corbett’s good-natured personality and tasty food.
“Dad … hates the fact that maybe kids think he kind of just blew it off and left.”
Tiffany Mason
Corbett has moved on — for now. Within a day of his firing, he got a job in the kitchen at Hartford High School, where his new employer is the New York-based Whitsons Culinary Group, a private equity-backed food service provider which acquired the Abbey Group this summer. He now drives 50 miles to work.
He declined to comment for this story because of new workplace rules.
Corbett’s plenty busy in Hartford but still smarting about the way he was treated in his hometown of Williamstown, according to his daughter, Tiffany Mason, who spoke to Seven Days on his behalf.
“Dad was just stunned,” Mason said. “He hates the fact that maybe kids [at Williamstown] think he just kind of blew it off and left.”
There’s been no clear reason given for Corbett’s firing, but it came just a few months after the Central Vermont Supervisory Union’s April vote to sign a contract with Genuine, a Boston-based company that provides meals for more than 100 schools and health care facilities in 16 states. The five-year contract must be reapproved by the school board annually.
Though there’s no comprehensive data, other Vermont school districts in recent years have turned to national food service firms that promise more consistency, competitive pricing and diverse menu options.
The school board based its decision to choose Genuine on a Vermont Agency of Education rubric that assigns points to companies’ bids in categories such as scratch cooking, local procurement and employee wages, according to Central Vermont superintendent Matthew Fedders.
Genuine scored best — by a smidge — but its annual cost came in slightly higher than the Abbey Group.
Joshua Dobrovich, the lone school board member to vote against Genuine, said he essentially saw the two plans as “apples to apples.” He believed that, for continuity, it was better to stick with the company the district already used.
Though the vote didn’t go Dobrovich’s way, he and others took comfort in the verbal assurance of a Genuine staffer at April’s school board meeting and in its written proposal to the district that all current kitchen staff would have the option of staying on.
While Corbett had a longstanding relationship with the Abbey Group, his daughter said, he decided to sign with Genuine because he loved working at Williamstown; he was born and raised in the community, and two of his grandchildren attend the school.
But then Corbett received a text message from Genuine’s regional director of operations, Rebecca Sosvielle, instructing him to call their Boston office, according to Mason. When he did, she told him that he was not a good fit for “the Genuine family,” and, as he was still under the company’s 90-day probationary period, he was fired, Mason said.
Sosvielle, in an email to Seven Days, said the company doesn’t comment on personnel matters “out of respect for privacy.”
“All employment decisions at Genuine Foods are made after careful review and in accordance with established policies,” she wrote.
Sosvielle was more forthcoming in an email to an upset parent, saying the company “did not make the decision to part ways with Tom lightly” and characterized it as “a business decision, not a personal one.”
But residents of Williamstown are taking it personally. News of Corbett’s firing has garnered scores of sympathetic comments on the “Billtown Residents Chat” Facebook page. And close to 300 people have signed an online petition that Mason started, asking that her father be reinstated.
“Chef Tom was one of the few people … that made me feel seen.”
Brenna Lee
At Central Vermont Supervisory Union’s school board meeting last week, several board members said they were concerned about Corbett’s dismissal.
“In our communities, we value our employees so much, and we know that those employees, especially the ones that have been in the building for so long, have really important relationships with our kids,” board member Dan Morris said. “You can say on paper it’s Genuine Foods’ decision to make staffing moves, but it’s not consistent with what I take to be our values.”
At public comment during the meeting, Mason read a statement urging the community to take her dad’s firing as an opportunity to support companies that put human beings over profits and “contracts that protect the people who are the fabric of our schools and have invested their lives here.”
In an interview, Dobrovich, who also represents Williamstown and Chelsea in the Vermont legislature, said he’s grown more concerned about the district’s deal with Genuine. He’s heard negative feedback about the new food from people who work in the district, and he’s dismayed by Corbett’s firing, though he said he doesn’t know the specific circumstances behind it.
Genuine likely had the right to fire the chef “as long as they did their legal due diligence,” Dobrovich said, but his dismissal is a loss to the community.
“When you have someone like Tom who goes out of their way to show kids love and create good food,” Dobrovich said, “[those] humans are few and far between these days.”
Brenna Lee, a 2024 graduate of Williamstown Middle High School, feels similarly. As a vegetarian, she found it a challenge to navigate food options in the cafeteria, but Corbett always took time to explain the menu and suggest things she might like, Lee wrote in an email to Seven Days.
“Chef Tom,” she wrote, “was one of the few people at WMHS that made me feel seen.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Early Dismissal | A national food service company started a food fight when it fired a popular Williamstown school chef”
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
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