They’ve lived in Franklin for 14 years, but it wasn’t until Tuesday’s city election that Marinete and Kelly Wilcox felt compelled to vote.
“We just needed change,” said Marinete, who stood with her husband and two children, Sebastian, 5, and Savannah, 7, outside the Ward 1 polls.
Change is what they got, with newcomer Heather Moquin beating incumbent Ted Starkweather, 150-127, for the Ward 1 city council seat. Anya Twarog won a four-way race between all new candidates for the three-year school board seat, with 131 of the 269 votes.
In Ward 2, Vincent Ribas garnered victory over former city councilor Glen Feener, 129-103, for the three-year council seat. Incumbent Susan Hallett Cook won back her Ward 2, two-year school board seat, while newcomer Paul Doucette took the three-year board position.
First-time candidate Tina Thurber had filed her candidacy for the two-year seat, though she asked voters to write her in for the three-year seat after assessing the other two candidates in her ward.
“I think that the school board would benefit from both Susan and myself,” Thurber said outside city hall Tuesday. While she got the most votes of all three people – 176 versus Hallett Cook’s 121 and Doucette’s 114 – they were split almost evenly between the two seats.
This left Thurber short of winning either school board seat.
Ward 3 was the quietest one Tuesday, with just one contested seat for school board. Incumbent Tim Dow won back his position, 153-32, against Carla Lavoy, and Steve Barton was re-elected to city council unopposed.
For the Wilcoxes, who are both registered nurses, they’re looking for change in the Franklin school system. This past summer, the school board and city council held numerous meetings to address an almost $1 million school budget revenue shortfall.
The council is also going to vote later in the month on whether the school district should withdraw from its joint SAU with Hill, and the city is looking to upcoming years when the school budget gap is likely going togrow as student enrollment and state aid shrinks.
In light of the ongoing challenges their city’s schools, Kelly and Marinete Wilcox said they had a discussion about whether they should move to another town in pursuit of better school curriculums, smaller class sizes, and more individualized education.
“We’d like to avoid that, which is why we’d like to bring some change on if possible,” Kelly said, indicating his recently cast ballot.
The Wilcoxes were in good company Tuesday as several more Franklin residents registered to vote and a slightly larger number of already-registered voters showed up at the polls. A number of those interviewed by the Monitor cited the schools as their main issue.
Moderators in all three wards said their turnouts were better than expected – between 8 and 14 percent – by the “getting out of work” hours.
It was good for a non-mayoral year, said Ward 1 moderator Steve Foley, who added that it was “nice to see” contested races when in past years, it was difficult to get enough people to just file for the races.
The candidates that ran this year said, too, that election day was generally a friendly, positive experience.
“We’ve had a blast,” said Susan Hallett Cook outside city hall on Tuesday. “We’ve had coffee and ice cream fed to us, and I brought donuts. Lots of camaraderie.”
In Ward 1, Heather Moquin said some voters asked her and other candidates about specific issues before casting a ballot, and even in quiet Ward 3, Steve Barton and Tim Dow said it was nice to have political engagement from a healthy number of candidates, many of whom are younger.
“I think it’s good for Franklin,” Barton said.
That good energy is likely to carry forward, Thurber said, regardless of the election’s outcome, now that more people have been following the schools issue, and want to do something about it.
“I think no matter who wins or loses, we’re all going to remain involved,” she said.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)