Incumbents Barb Higgins and Pamela Walsh as well as newcomer Sarah Sadowski narrowly edged out three competitors to claim seats in the at-large race for Concord School Board.

Voters could choose up to three candidates from an open pool of six. Higgins finished first with 8,159 votes, or 19.5% of the total tally, followed by Walsh with 7,689 or 18.3% percent, and Sadowski with 7,557 or 18%.

The three unsuccessful candidates were Clint Cogswell with 6,891 votes, Andrew Winters with 6,705 and Joe Scroggins with 4,919.

The win for Walsh and the loss for Winters and Scroggins stand in stark contrast to the decisive success of the two amendments to the district charter that were up for a vote. Walsh was the only vocal opponent of the amendments in the race and Scroggins and Winters both ran with the express purpose of revisiting and reversing the school board’s decision to build the new middle school in East Concord, as the amendments were aimed to do.

Sadowski had called the middle school decision a “flawed public process,” and pledged to support the outcome of the votes.

“I’m super humbled and really excited to get to work,” she said Tuesday night. “It’s going to be a long wait until January.”

Many Walsh backers saw their votes on the candidates and the charter amendments as interconnected.

Randy Kosow, who lives in the South End with his wife, Carmen, worried about candidates who were only running on the middle school issue. He felt they lacked experience and backed Walsh, Higgins and Cogswell, a longtime former principal and school board member in Concord.

“We’ve got several people running for school board that are single-issue people without seeing a big picture of education,” he said. “I think they’re running purely on the geography of where a school is built. After that one vote, what do they do then? What do they do about what’s in the next math curriculum?”

After initially supporting rebuilding Rundlett at the current location, the voices of teachers who see Broken Ground’s forested backdrop as a better educational setting, Kosow changed his mind.

“I like the idea of keeping the school where it was, originally. It sounded good. I saw all the lawn signs,” Kosow said. “But I wasn’t thinking about money, I wasn’t thinking about the quality of education of the next generation.”

The school board, he realized, was thinking about those things. “They’re looking at a bigger picture that I don’t see.”

Higgins, who has both expressed reservations and support for the amendments at different times, held high name recognition with voters. As a longtime former teacher and coach in the district, and as the board’s longest-serving member — she’ll now serve a fifth three-year term.

“I’ve known Barb pretty much the bulk of my life, and I believe she has worked for the school as well as been in the school board for a while, and I think she is a fair one to stay in,” Doneka Chamberland.

Some voters were either unaware that there was a school board ballot or had only heard about the proposed charter amendments and not the school board race. They said in interviews they either left it blank or chose people at random.

For those coming in cold to the booth on those issues, many weren’t comfortable choosing a school board candidate. But they read through the amendments and decided whether or not they agreed with them. Everyone interviewed in this situation voted yes on both.

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com