Mount Greylock School Committee to Feature One November Race
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 Gary Fuls of Williamstown, above, will run to finish the term he was appointed to on the Mount Greylock School Committee earlier this month. Wendy Penner, right, is one of three Williamstown residents on the November ballot for two available four-year spots. |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — There will be one race for the five Mount Greylock Regional School Committee seats on the November ballot.
There are two seats for Lanesborough residents and three for Williamstown residents to be decided when voters of the two towns go to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 4.
Williamstown has two four-year seats on the ballot: those currently held by Chairwoman Carolyn Greene and David Langston.
Greene is standing for re-election, but Langston decided not to try for another term on the committee.
Voters will pick two names from among the threesome of Greene, Wendy Penner and Steve Miller for the four-year seats.
Penner is a longtime community activist who has been involved in projects like the Mount Greylock School Building Committee and the school building project for Williamstown Elementary School. She is perhaps best known around town as a leading advocate for COOL (Carbon Dioxide Lowering) Committee.
Miller is a mathematics professor at Williams College and father of two with his wife, Elizabeth. Their older child is entering second grade at WES.
Those children helped motivated him to serve the district, he said.
"Obviously, Mount Greylock is something I care about," he said Wednesday. "Education is facing a lot of very important issues. Nationally, there's the Common Core and curriculum issues and locally, there are issues about [Mount Greylock's] building."
At Williams, he works in the Bronfman Science Center, which, like Mount Greylock, is a building in transition.
"I've been going to meetings at the college to decide what they're going to do there," Miller said. "Right now one of the things the college is trying to decide is whether they renovate, whether they rebuild, how do we renovate? And then how do we manage the disruption? What does the building look like in the future if we build a new building?"
A graduate of Yale who earned his master's and doctorate's degrees at Princeton, Miller gives yearly lectures in Boston to high school and junior high school teachers.
"For almost 30 years, I've been involved in education at every level from kindergarten to graduate school," he said. "I've had a lot of conversations with people about what you do with Common Core, how you keep teachers excited and enthused. ... I've had a lot of experience with people on the ground who have to work directly with our students."
A third Williamstown seat on the board also will be on the ballot, a two-year slot to fill out the remainder of the term formerly held by David Backus. Earlier this month, Gary Fuls was appointed to occupy that chair until the November election, and he has submitted papers to finish the term.
There are two four-year seats on the seven-member committee for Lanesborough residents and just two names will appear on the ballot.
Incumbent Chris Dodig has submitted papers to retain his spot on the committee. Richard Cohen has filed for the spot currently held by Robert Ericson, who has decided not to stand for re-election.
Voters in both towns of the regional school district vote on all seats on the committee.
Tags: election 2014, MGRHS, school committee,
