The woman who circulated a petition to have Rochelle Kelley removed from office more than a year ago will now take her seat on the Weare School Board.
The Weare School Board appointed former school board candidate Alyssa Small to temporarily fill the open position left by Kelley, who resigned last week.
Board members held a special meeting Wednesday to discuss how to fill the vacant seat left by Kelley, who resigned after the board passed a mask mandate for the district, which Kelley called child abuse. Members decided unanimously to extend an offer to Small, who was the school board candidate who got the highest number of votes without winning a seat in the most recent school board election of March 2021. Small received 318 votes in March, placing her third behind Sarah Button (374) and Daniel Recupero (373), who both won seats on the board.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to serve on the Weare School Board, even at this difficult time,” Small said Thursday. “From attending recent school board meetings, subbing at one of our district’s schools, and parenting two kids in our school system, I am keenly aware of the year’s special challenges. I plan to do a lot of listening and learning at first and hope to encourage a positive spirit of collaboration in the community.”
Small will be sworn in at the next Weare School Board meeting on October 19. She will serve for five months until the March 8, 2022 election when there will be two open positions for school board, a one-year term to fill the remainder of Kelley’s term and a three-year term.
In May 2020, Small started a Change.org petition to remove Kelley from her position on the board following an incident Kelley has since been acquitted for, in which police said she refused to leave a Concord playground that had been closed due to COVID-19 precautions. The petition garnered 5,307 signatures.
At Wednesday’s meeting, board members expressed a desire to fill the open position quickly, before the October meeting.
“The budget season is crazy-pants for school board members,” chair Wendy Curry said. “Starting in October we are going to have lots of meetings, lots of information, lots of data that you have to have, so if we don’t seat somebody in October, they will not be privy to all the discussions that happen.”
They considered putting out a call for applications and interviewing candidates for the job, or requesting a past board member return to serve again, methods that have been used by other New Hampshire school boards to fill vacancies in the past. But all ultimately agreed that bringing in the most favored runner-up from the last election would best represent the preference of the voting public.
“The town is extremely divided right now,” Curry said. “If we go down the interview process, whoever we select, half of the community is going to be angry, they’re going to say there’s conspiracies. There’s no way to give the voters a say, other than looking at the last election.”