School board to fill Duxbury opening on Wednesday

July 13, 2021 | By Lisa Scagliotti

The Harwood Unified Union School District Board has a special meeting scheduled for Wednesday evening to make one of two appointments to fill vacancies representing Duxbury and Waterbury. 

Two applicants from Duxbury are scheduled to meet with the board at 6 p.m. The meeting will be held in the library at Harwood Union High School with remote access via Zoom. Anyone wishing to comment, however, would need to attend in person. The meeting agenda -- with just one action item being the board appointment – is online at huusd.org. The agenda has background information regarding the applicants and the process so far. 

Two applicants, Cindy Senning and Patrick Zachary, both wrote letters of interest for the position that runs until Town Meeting Day 2022. At that point, voters would fill the seat for the remaining year of the term. 

A resident of Duxbury since 1971, Senning summed up her past experience with local schools that began with her working as a school nurse and health teacher at Harwood Union High School in the 1980s. She later was principal at Duxbury Primary School and served on the school board formed when Waterbury and Duxbury merged their elementary schools and built a middle school together. Her children, now adults, were educated in the district’s schools and she presently has three grandchildren in the local system.

“I think you can see that I have a vested interest in this district. I have been a parent, teacher, nurse, administrator, school board member, tax payer, and now a grandparent. I have a strong commitment to education, students, and this district and believe I have a lot to contribute,” she wrote. 

A civil engineer who worked at IBM and now at Global Foundries in Essex, Zachary said he has been a landowner in Duxbury since 2003 and a resident since 2006. He’s currently on the town’s Development Review Board. He said his job involves cost-benefit and return-on-investment analyses, skills that could be helpful in serving on the school board. 

“Schools are particularly important to the livelihood of any community and must be preserved equal to any other critical community service,” Zachary wrote in his letter. “I believe I will be able to help with current cost and future cost issues as well as help those on the school board come to a cost-effective and beneficial decision for any issue in front of us.”

The vacancies come at a time when the school district is looking to invest in significant renovations and improvements at Harwood High School and Crossett Brook Middle School. The Duxbury opening was created when Brian Dalla Mura, who was elected in March to serve two remaining years in a Duxbury seat, resigned in June. He had accepted a teaching position at Brookside Primary School in Waterbury starting July 1 for the coming school year and by state law could not also serve as a school board member.

As part of the appointment process, the Duxbury Selectboard was invited to make a recommendation on the choice. The selectboard met Monday and reviewed both letters of interest and thanked both for volunteering. The board voted to express a preference for Senning given her experience in education and it asked the school board to interview the candidates before making the final choice. 

Board Chair Mari Pratt, who is an employee at Harwood Union High School, did not take part in the vote or share a preference for either applicant. 

The school board still has a Waterbury opening to fill following the resignation last month of Waterbury board member Michael Frank. Applicants are asked to email board Chair Torrey Smith at tcsmith@huusd.org and Superintendent Brigid Nease at bnease@huusd.org by Sunday, July 18, so that the Waterbury Select Board at its July 19 meeting could review choices and make a recommendation. 

The school board will schedule a second special meeting to make that appointment which would also run through Town Meeting 2022. The Waterbury seat at that time would have two more years in its term for voters to fill.

The HUUSD School Board has 14 members representing the district's six communities. Duxbury has two seats; Waterbury has four.

The school board agenda with the Zoom link and background information can be found online here.