TURNERS FALLS — This year’s Gill-Montague School Committee election includes three seats up for re-election, with two new faces in each race. Two of the seats are in Montague where incumbents Michael Langknecht and April Reipold are running against challenger Cassie Damkoehler, with voters allowed to pick two of the three on the ballot.
Michael Langknecht is the current chair of the board and has been on the school committee for four terms, and once vacancy term. He has lived in town for 25 years and had three children go through the Gill-Montague Regional School District.
Langknecht said that there’s a considerable learning curve to the School Committee so it’s important to have members with experience to help with consistency.
He’s aware of a lot of different challenges facing public education across the district and the state right now.
“The privatization is a challenge to the public education,” he said.
Langknecht said he hopes to focus on a mix of big picture and granular issues.
In recent years, the district’s member towns and the school district have aligned themselves more, but Langknecht said he thinks there could be a more direct and constant partnership between the district and the towns.
Langknecht said there’s also a disconnect between the community and the schools.
“Personally I think one of the things missing from public education is an introduction to what you’re going to do once you get out of it,” he said.
Additionally, he wants to make sure members of the community, especially parents, are involved in the district and wants the district to give people in the towns an opportunity to share their educational goals.
“We spend a lot of time trying to meet the state and federal standards without asking our parents what they want,” he said.
He said the district doesn’t do anything to keep track of graduates once they’ve left the school. “We talk about developing young people into productive members of society. But how do we know we succeeded?”
As for the controversial Indians mascot, Langknecht voted no when the committee voted to change it, which he said was because the committee voted to end the process early and take an up or down vote.
The next step is finalizing the criteria for selecting a new mascot, which he thinks is the most important step, because it will allow for a lot of clear-cut public participation going forward because everyone will be on the same page about how the mascot proposals will be judged.
Langknecht said he hopes that everyone who has been invested in this process sends in proposals for the mascot.
He said they can’t change the vote that ended the mascot process, but there’s a lot the board can do going forward that can include the public.
Cassie Damkoehler is running for the first time for a seat on the school committee. She is challenging Langknecht and Reipold for one of the two Montague seats.
She’s lived in Turners Falls with her family for 11 years, and grew up in Greenfield. Damkoehler has three children who are all currently in the district.
Damkoehler said she was a stay-at-home mother for several years, allowing her to be involved in her children’s schools.
She said the mascot issue was what initially piqued her interest in the School Committee, but she has since started tuning in to other issues, like writing policies and the district’s budget.
With the mascot, Damkoehler said she understands why it had to be changed, and that eventually, every school with a Native American mascot in Massachusetts will have to deal with this, but that she understands the frustration from those who want to keep it.
“I hated to see that people felt like they weren’t heard,” she said.
She said her biggest issue was with the process, which she said felt rushed.
“Going forward I would just like to be a positive voice to help bridge the two sides as we move forward from this,” she said.
Beyond that issue, Damkoehler said she wants to work to find a way to keep students in the district. She said working to combat school choice should be a priority for the school committee.
Part of that, she thinks, could be aided by talking to families who leave and those who stay and identifying areas of concerns for families.
She also wants to improve the AP class offerings at the high school, something she said can help keep more students engaged in the material.
But Damkoehler’s focus is the budget, and hopes to bring a fresh perspective to it. She wants to find a way to work within the district’s means to get the most out of the money they have.
“I see a lot of what the schools go without, so I feel like being on the committee, I bring that voice of seeing it first hand,” she said.
April Reipold is running for her second term on School Committee. Reipold moved to Turners Falls in 1989.
Reipold spent some time in the school district before she earned her GED and started taking classes at GCC. She then went to college where she met her husband and then returned to Turners Falls to raise her family.
Reipold said her daughter utilizes the special education services at the school district, something that’s helped her connect to the schools in the different way. “I really care about the town. I really care about the kids, and I really care about the special ed,” she said.
Reipold said she doesn’t want to come as intimidating or overly professional on the committee. She served on the school council, the parent teacher association and was the chair of the special education council in the district.
Reipold said she decided to run for school committee because she wanted to directly influence policies and rules, something only the school committee does. She said she doesn’t like the amount of standardized testing the students have to do. “Kids aren’t standard,” she said. “I’m a really big believer in that.”
She said she also has a focus of the maintenance of buildings, not only through capital improvement projects, but also the support staffing that makes the buildings run.
Reipold said one of the things the committee could work on is improving communication with parents and families.
“Parents need to know things, sometimes they’re really left out of the loop,” she said.
As for the mascot, Reipold voted against changing it, and wanted to dispel the rumor that she voted that way to protect her seat on the committee.
She said she didn’t like that the process had been cut short, and that a lot of the rhetoric around the issue concerned her, adding her preferred solution would have been working with local Native Americans to do it the right way, and make the mascot reflect the area.
“The whole thing just felt like no one’s feelings we’re getting heard,” she said.
Reipold said she didn’t like the way advocates of change spoke about the town and the residents that supported keeping the mascot. “It was like being told, you need to do this, or else,” she said. “That’s just not the way I operate.”
She said she was also really concerned with how the process was cut short so suddenly. “It was like we pulled the rug out from underneath them,” Reipold said.
She said she wanted the rest of the process to be much slower and more inclusive and transparent to the community.
Beyond that issue, Reipold wants voters to know that if she seems quiet at meetings, it’s not because she isn’t thinking over the issues. She often won’t speak if a point has already been made by other members. She said she doesn’t try to choose her stance over personal opinions, but rather what she thinks the community wants and what the schools need.
“I like to think of myself as an independent person that does what’s best for the school and doesn’t just do what the majority wants,” she said.