The race for Concord School Board turned out to be uncontested this year, even though it didn’t start that way.
Former candidate Tim Benitez, who had filed to run, withdrew from the race Monday, citing “unforeseen circumstances,” leaving three candidates and three open at-large seats.
Incumbents Barb Higgins and Pam Walsh and challenger Bob Cotton are all running for seats on the board in the city-wide election on Nov. 2. Winners will begin their terms on January 1, 2022 and serve a three-year term.
All three candidates will participate in a Concord Monitorcandidate forum Thursday night at Concord High School.
Newcomer Bob Cotton wants to use his experience working with corporations and nonprofits to help the board to develop a strategic plan to guide the district’s future.
Cotton, an attorney who does restructuring and advisory work for corporations, has lived in Concord for 38 years and is a Ward 5 resident. All three of his daughters graduated from the Concord public school system. Cotton has never held public office before, and says he is running now because he wants to help the community, and thinks there’s a need for fresh ideas on the current board.
“I strongly believe that you can tell the health of the community by the health of their schools,” Cotton said. “If you want to have a strong community and encourage people to continue to want to move to a place like Concord, I think it’s important that Concord has the best schools possible.”
It hasn’t been an easy year for school boards around New Hampshire, many of whom have faced anger from parents for their decisions about requiring masks as COVID-19 continues to spread. Cotton says he feels gratified by the amount of civility he has observed in Concord meetings when controversial issues have arisen. He says he wants to keep politics out of school board decisions, to the extent that it is possible.
“I think what we need to do is focus on the students, the kids, and make sure we all think we’re doing the best thing for them,” Cotton said. “It’s important that we also take responsibility for a civil society. It makes no sense for people to get angry with each other. We can have discussions, we can have disagreements, but we can do it civilly and I hope that’s the way it stays in Concord.”
Cotton’s top goal for the school board is to create a strategic plan for the district’s future.
“My experience with the corporate world and not-for-profit world, it’s important for organizations to have a strategic plan as to where they’re going, and it’s important to have input from all the constituents – the students, the staff, the educators, the taxpayers,” Cotton said. “The important thing about that, among other things, is it gives us something as a school board and community to measure our progress against and then the community can also decide whether or not we are measuring up to what we said we were going to do.”
Another important task the school board is tackling in the next several years is planning for the new Rundlett Middle School building, which includes considering a new 5-8 grade configuration. Cotton says that while Concord does have a need for pre-K options, he doesn’t want the decision around middle school grade configurations to be solely based on space.
“I would rather see us do the right thing for the fifth through eighth-graders in terms of their development, and then if we need to have extra space in our elementary schools, that’s a separate discussion,” Cotton said.
When it comes to Concord’s efforts around racial equity, Cotton says he is pleased with the work the district has been doing with diversity training, and wants to see the district explore alternative discipline practices to suspensions or expulsions, which impact Black and brown students at disproportionately higher rates.
“I am willing to believe that there are ways to discipline children that are innovative, that will result in better results for both the child and for the district as a whole and the city as a whole, and I think we ought to explore those,” Cotton said. “You have to look at the family situation, you have to look at the interaction between students and other students at the school. It’s important that counselors and school administrators be versed in what the alternatives should be.”
Statewide, districts are facing pressure from the New Hampshire Department of Education to avoid retuning to remote learning, including a new proposed rule that would mandate in-person learning despite high rates of COVID-19 transmission in the community. Cotton says that while learning should be in person if possible in Concord, the district should remain prepared to go remote if the science indicates that it is the safest option due to the pandemic.
“It’s important we are prepared for remote learning, it’s important we have the infrastructure in terms of technology to support the kids, and its important that we have the infrastructure in terms of mental health support and things like that to also support the kids and the staff and the faculty,” Cotton said.
Barb Higgins is finishing up her third term as a Concord School Board member, and hopes to bring her years of experience and interest in budget work to a fourth term.
Higgins, a Concord parent and elementary PE teacher at the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, served on the board as a District B representative from 2012 to 2017 and again as an at-large representative starting in 2019. This year, she has served as vice president of the board, chair of the board’s Instructional Committee and member of the Finance Committee.
Higgins says she considered not running this year, partly due to the time commitment brought by her now 6-month-old baby Jack, but also because she believes it’s important for school boards to have turnover. But given the large amount of turnover in the 2020 election when the board gained four new members, Higgins says she believes the board needs the perspective of a member with many years of experience.
“While I absolutely think there always has to be new people and you need a fresh set of eyes, you also need people on the board who have been around the block a few times and who understand the workings of the district and really what the functions and the role of the school board is,” Higgins said. “I have a pretty big commitment to the district and I’d love to be able to have the chance to see some things through.”
One of Higgins’s top goals as a board member is to find a budget spending balance that will satisfy school needs without creating hardship for taxpayers.
“Everything costs money, and to have good things you have to spend money,” Higgins said. “The biggest thing for me is finding the balance with financial responsibility and educational excellence….so students aren’t suffering because their education is poor and taxpayers aren’t moving out of Concord because they can’t afford to live here.”
She says another goal is to maintain a “healthy, functioning environment” for students, which this year means planning for COVID-19 recovery.
“In the forefront for me right now is to continue monitoring what we’re doing school-wide from K through 12 with COVID in the buildings,” Higgins said. “And making sure our students and teachers have support, really looking at curriculum and what we are teaching and testing.”
Higgins agreed that being a school board official has grown more challenging in recent years, in a community with polarized views on COVID-19 safety protocols and learning models, which Higgins said became particularly apparent during remote meetings last year when the anonymous online comments directed at board members were harsher than she believes people would say in person.
“It’s not easy being a public official right now. I am certainly not doing it on some levels because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy,” Higgins said. “I do it because I really care about the kids and I care about our community and our district.”
In planning for the Rundlett Middle School building project, Higgins wants to gather as much community input as possible about the building’s location and design, and also gather extensive research on what’s most beneficial for students in terms of 5 to 8 versus 6 to 8-grade configurations.
“For me, the biggest thing would be to facilitate slow, researched, fact-based progress,” Higgins said. “We don’t just jump in and decide something and then make the community think that’s what they wanted. I think we have some of that backhandedness in our district’s history, and I don’t think that’s right. Whatever the decision is, it comes after thorough, thorough research and hard work.”
When it comes to the district’s efforts to improve racial equity, Higgins says she is glad the district has started the work and is seeking out student perspectives, but that there is a lot of work left to do.
“We are a district that is acknowledging we need to have racial equity, we need to talk about these things, we need to bring things to the forefront when they’re not right,” Higgins said. “We need to talk about how we treat students. Do we punish some kids more than others? Are we looking at one group of students more than others? Those things happen all the time, and as a district, we need to constantly analyze what we’re doing and how we can make it right, or make it better.”
If elected, Higgins hopes for as much community involvement as possible in board discussions.
“If you have an opinion and you want to come share it, come share it if you have suggestions as to how we as a board can do a better job or be more efficient,” Higgins said. “Lots and lots of people voice opinions and then disappear, and always, always we look for support and help in anything.”
With her first year on the Concord School Board almost complete, Pamela Walsh is ready to take on three more, with a focus on pandemic recovery for students, both academic and emotional.
Walsh, who was first elected to the board in November 2020, is finishing up a one-year term which she took on after a former board member resigned unexpectedly the same year. She believes that while she has made good progress toward her goals of improving board transparency and getting students back into in-person learning in the last 10 months, there is still a lot of progress to be made, which is why she is seeking re-election.
“I think I ask important questions,” Walsh said of her role on the board. “What I have tried to do is provide information directly to the public about what happens at meetings, to ask for feedback. When people ask questions I try to ask their questions – even if I don’t necessarily agree with the question – privately to the administration or publicly at a school board meeting depending on what the issue is.”
Walsh is a Ward 4 resident who works as senior advisor to Sen. Maggie Hassan. She has a child in third grade at Christa McAuliffe School. On the board, she’s chair of the Finance Committee and a member of the Capital Facilities and Instructional committees.
Although community opinion has been polarized on COVID-19 issues this year, particularly on remote learning and mask mandates, Walsh said she feels gratified by the civility of discussions at Concord meetings. Walsh said she bases her COVID-19 decisions on the guidance of health experts, including the state Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and will continue to do so.
“We have been very lucky that our community members have come but they’ve participated in meetings, not tried to stop meetings or disrupt meetings,” Walsh said. “I think that’s important. All the viewpoints are important.”
For Walsh, getting students safely back to in-person learning during the pandemic was her primary focus last year, and is now looking ahead to a pandemic recovery plan to help students get back on track academically and mentally after a year of remote and hybrid learning models, and bring students back to the district who may have left last year for private school or homeschool.
“We have several years worth of federal funding, and continuing to make sure we are using those dollars in ways that are helpful to students, helping them be where they need to be, to be successful throughout their school careers,” Walsh said. “That includes the emotional side of it as well, the socialization side of it.”
Returning to remote learning in the future would be a last-resort option for Walsh, although she doesn’t believe the state should limit school districts’ ability to implement it.
“We haven’t gotten a lot of positive guidance from the Department of Education on how to keep students safe, I don’t think they should be limiting options,” Walsh said. “I think they should be working proactively with districts to help avoid that. We should all have the same goal, which is not to disrupt day-to-day learning and to make sure kids stay healthy.”
Walsh also wants to help the board develop a strategic plan for the district that includes goals for student academic achievement.
Looking ahead to the Rundlett Middle School building project, Walsh says she wants the new building to be cost-effective and energy-efficient to reflect Concord’s goals on renewable energy use. She also wants to make a location decision that avoids taking taxable land that could be used for economic development away from the City. She plans to gather more information about the success rate of 5-8 and 6-8 middle schools elsewhere in the state, to help make the decision about grade configuration.
“I think we need to have a series of conversations with the community where we present both the benefits and the possible disadvantages, and how we would deal with the disadvantages,” Walsh said. “I think the other thought is, Rundlett – does it meet our needs for now or into the future? I think we need to make sure we build a building that isn’t outdated in 20 years, that will last.”
Walsh supports the district’s ongoing racial equity work, including efforts to implement restorative justice methods for handling discipline problems. She says the work on incorporating racial equity and diverse perspectives into the school curriculum is still ongoing, and will continue despite the ‘divisive concepts’ law officially called the ‘Right to Freedom From Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education,’ which passed this summer and which the Concord School Board unanimously opposed.
“It’s important for people to understand that making sure that work will continue even with the new state law which the board opposed because unfortunately, it makes teachers concerned that they will face disciplinary procedures on the state level for trying to teach history,” Walsh said. “And we are going to work with our teachers to make sure our students have a well-rounded inclusive view of history and literature. All of that continues to be important and I think that doesn’t mean belittling one race, it means making sure the story of all America is told in our classroom.”