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Candidates are lining up
By Derek Gentile, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Aug 12, 2008
Tuesday, August 12 SHEFFIELD - A total of 13 candidates, including six from Sheffield, will vie for 10 slots on the Southern Berkshire Regional School Committee. These will be the first School Committee elections in the district in more than a decade. The Sheffield candidates include Dennis Sears, Katherine Miller, Scott Sanes, Vito Valentini, incumbent John Pollitt and Andrew Pederoff. They will be vying for four slots in Sheffield.
In New Marlborough, there are two slots open: Incumbent Herbert Abelow will be running against former School Committee Chairman Charles McSpiritt and Steven Dunsay for those positions.
Those are the two towns in the five-town school district that feature races. In Egremont, Steve Willig and Charles Flynn will be running for two slots, while Deborah Mielke will be running unopposed in Egremont and Linda Silvestri will face a similar situation in Alford.
"It's an excellent slate of candidates, and we're all looking forward to running for election," said Sears, who was the linchpin of the movement to transform the appointed positions on the School Committee into elected ones.
All 13 candidates had a relatively narrow window of opportunity in which to file nomination papers: The legislation to change the appointed posts to elected ones was signed by Gov. Deval L. Patrick on July 25. Candidates had until July 29 to garner 33 signatures for nomination papers.
But the 13 candidates all managed to find enough supporters over that weekend to present to the town clerks in their respective communities.
Back in May, voters in all five towns approved a draft of enabling legislation that would create elected instead of appointed posts. This came a year after the Sheffield Selectmen refused to reappoint two prominent School Committee members, including Miller, because their fiscal philosophy did not line up with that of the Selectmen.
This method of voting for School Committee members, called district-wide voting, calls for each candidate to be listed under his or her home town. However, voters in all five towns can vote for each candidate.
The voting is set up so that the committee itself retains the same membership structure, that is, Sheffield will still have four members, Egremont and New Marlborough two each and Monterey and Alford one member each.
The district-wide method has been in place in the adjacent Berkshire Hills Regional School District for several years with little or no controversy.
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