Two candidates from Concord’s voting district B are seeking a spot on the Concord School Board this year. One of them is incumbent David Parker who has served on the board since 2020, and the other is challenger Cara Meeker, an elementary school parent and former legislative editor.
The District B candidate will be elected for a three-year term by voters residing in Wards 5, 6 and 7.
Cara Meeker is new to Concord, but says her love for the region and passion for community involvement goes back much further.
Meeker, an office manager at Red River Theatres, is a candidate for the Concord School Board’s District B seat. Meeker lives in Ward 7 with her husband and daughter, who is a fourth-grader at Abbot-Downing School. The family moved to Concord in June 2021 from Denver, Colorado, where Meeker worked as a legislative editor for the Colorado State Legislature. Meeker, whose husband Tom Daigle is a Concord native, says she doesn’t feel like a newcomer as their family has visited the area regularly since 2005.
“Part of the reason I got excited about running for School Board is because it taps into a lot of what I used to do in terms of meeting with community members and hearing about policies and working through the tough issues to find consensus and solutions,” Meeker said.
Meeker believes she would be a good fit for the board because of her non-partisan legislative experience, and her time spent serving as elected president of her neighborhood homeowners’ association back in Colorado.
“I’m very accustomed to reading and assessing policy, I am accustomed to long public meetings,” Meeker said. “I know what it’s like to be faced with difficult choices and very differing opinions about the future of your neighborhood, so I feel like I’m ready for those conversations.”
Meeker has been doing her homework on Concord in preparation for her run, watching old meeting recordings and touring the Rundlett Middle School building to get a sense of the local issues. She believes the most important task facing the school district right now is the Rundlett building project.
“It’s really important to me that we just keep moving forward,” Meeker said. “I know there’s some division as to where the new school should be located, how much it’s going to cost. Oftentimes, fear over these big projects causes things to stall, delay, fizzle out, and I really don’t want that to happen. As a parent of a future middle-schooler I feel like my daughter and all of the kids in Concord deserve a new, accessible, energy-efficient school.”
Another important task, according to Meeker, is making sure students are back on track socially and emotionally after the remote learning years during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“One of the things I love about Concord is the encouragement of everyone to be outside,” Meeker said. “I really want to make sure that our children, while utilizing technology for their learning experience, aren’t solely dependent on that technology. I really want to pay attention to what that’s doing to kids and how we can help them learn and grow back in an in-person environment.”
Meeker wants to be an advocate for public education to combat what she describes as a “stripping” of the public education system, citing some recent controversial pieces of legislation like the state’s “Freedom From Discrimination in Education” law and Education Freedom Account voucher program.
“We need people to champion the cause of public education and what it does to level the playing field for every kid in our state,” Meeker said.
If elected to the board, one of Meeker’s goals would be to ensure that the Board’s policies on bullying and discrimination and the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are fully understood and being implemented throughout the schools.
“It needs to be sustained and it needs to continue and it needs to be something that is just part of our everyday lives from now on, it shouldn’t just be a Band-Aid,” Meeker said.
David Parker is running for re-election to the Concord School Board because he wants to see the large number of policy and program changes that the Board has initiated in recent years, come to fruition.
Parker, who lives in Ward 5, is the founder and director of Parker Academy, a private 6 to 12 school in Concord. Parker joined the Concord School Board in 2020, where he has served on the Capital Facilities Committee, the Communications and Policy Committee and the City and Community Relations Committee.
Parker said he’s also running because he wants to support the administration, which includes many new hires, as they take on new projects.
“A lot of these positions have been filled with in the last year or so,” Parker said. “And I would like to see that team work together for a while.”
Parker first ran for School Board in 2019, on a platform of improving transparency and promoting healing within the community in the aftermath of a Concord teacher’s arrest on sexual assault charges earlier that year. Today, Parker said that there is still work to be done around healing within the community.
“We were divided and separated, some by the nature of the situation but also by maybe some mistakes in transparency,” Parker said. “The community experience was significant and it isn’t something that’s just going to be fixed, healing will take some time.”
Parker said he is proud of the way the Board handled learning during COVID-19, but that there is still work to be done around supporting students’ social and emotional needs in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“It was it was incredibly time consuming and very contentious,” Parker said of the Board’s COVID-19 decision-making. “But I think we stayed focused on the most important piece, which is safety.”
Parker believes the most important task facing the school district right now is the Rundlett Middle School building project.
“I’m just really excited about it, regardless of where it is,” Parker said. “The way that schools are designed now are very different from the way they were designed when Rundlett was built 50 to 60 years ago. I’m excited about the program possibilities, the layout, zero net sum energy use, programming for kids that would allow them access to support in a very modern, ‘best practices’ way.”
Other important tasks facing the district, according to Parker, will be tackling environmental sustainability initiatives within the district and anticipating student population growth that could come from the several new housing developments slated for Concord.
Additionally, Parker believes part of the District’s ongoing diversity equity and inclusion work should be increasing diversity among school staff, to match the diversity of the student body.
If Parker wins another term on the board, he says there is a lot of work still to be done.
“We set a large agenda for ourselves as a board. We also spend a lot of time, so it is a huge commitment for anyone on that board,” Parker said. “I know the community appreciates it, but I’m not sure they realize the extent of what we need to do run this fairly, fairly large district. We have a very dedicated, hardworking staff and a really good community. We’re working as hard as we can.”