Voting Polls: From Schools to the Supermarket?

The Peabody School Committee wants to remove voting from the city's schools.

Citing safety concerns for students and the disruption to the school day as the main issues, board members agreed Tuesday night to send a letter to local election officials to ask for the change and instead, consider alternative locations for polling sites, such as the senior center, churches and supermarkets.

Welch School Principal Monique Nappi and about 20 parents were in the audience to support the effort. School Committee member Brandi Carpenter distributed several letters of support from parents and teachers, Nappi and two parents spoke Tuesday night and 253 people signed a petition.

"We fully understand that this undertaking will require additional administrative work to include finding new polling sites and providing sufficient notice to voters. The Peabody School Committee feels that the additional work is unquestionably worth the added benefits toward creating safer and efficiently functioning educational spaces in our schools," Carpenter wrote in a letter she drafted for her colleagues to sign.

Carpenter strongly argued for the same thing five years ago shortly after being elected to the committee. She argued then, as now, that other cities were making changes out of concerns for student safety and convenience for voters.

She said tragedies such as Columbine, Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon bombing last month have changed things and made school safety of paramount importance.

A prime example of change, Carpenter said, is Worcester, where voting now occurs in the city's supermarkets, among other neighborhood places.

The change has been so successful that the stores are refusing rent from the city for use of the space and setting up special shopping aisles for voters, Carpenter said she was told by the Worcester City Clerk.

Parking also poses a challenge at times, and children have been hit by cars outside their schools in other communities in recent years.

The opinion from the Peabody Board of Registrars five years ago, however, was that the eight city schools used for polls are the most central and accessible locations in those neighborhoods.

In light of the reticence to change, the School Committee decided then to just cancel school on Election Day in November. Carpenter said Tuesday that was a compromise and she'd rather not break up the month further than it already is with holidays.

"I'm going to push a little bit harder [now] for what I originally wanted," she said, calling it a proactive measure and the "right thing to do" for the safety of students. The glut of elections the city has held since September -- five with one more next month for regular and special elections -- has only exacerbated the situation, she said.

Carpenter also argued that other states are considering outright bans on voting in schools and that Peabody would only be taking a proactive step in that direction.

Nappi told the committee that while she and everyone else supported the right to vote, she didn't believe schools were the appropriate place to do so. She said the two main concerns of her job are children's safety and education.

"When voting happens, my hat goes on: what is going to happen in the building?" she said, adding that while two police officers are stationed inside the school gym and poll workers are great to work with, she still doesn't know who's coming in to vote.

Nappi said the front door is not secured and therefore it's not a "safe school." Students are not allowed out in the hallway and she's out there for nearly the entire day if the polls are busy.

She said she dreads having to face the day her worst fears come to life: "It only takes once incident to set us back. I don't want to risk that it's one of my children."

The committee voted 4-1 Tuesday to accept Carpenter's letter and ask for a change to be in place by the 2014-2015 school year.

Dave McGeney said the main reasons he supported the measure were because of the disruption voting causes in a regular school day and safety concerns both inside and outside school buildings.

"The fact that it might be inconvenient pales in comparison to the inconvenience that some 6,000 students and their parents have to jump through hoops to accommodate the Election Day," he said.

He added that regular voters will vote no matter where the location is; those who don't, wouldn't vote even if the poll was right next-door, he said.

Jarrod Hochman, while voting for the measure, said he didn't feel the safety concerns were as dire as Carpenter and others indicated, but the school day was disrupted and he was in favor of possibly having private enterprises become polling sites and help pick up the tab on the costs to the city.

Tom Rossignoll was absent and Beverley Griffin Dunne voted against the proposal, saying she felt changes could be made in how the public accesses the schools on Election Day instead. She also noted schools, as municipal buildings, are easier and accessible to use as polling sites.

The committee also supported a motion from McGeney requesting a legal opinion from the city solicitor on whether the School Committee has authority to deny access to the schools.

The schools used now for eight of the city's 19 polling sites are as follows:

The list of possible alternative locations included in the letter are as follows:

• Torigian Community Life Center, 79 Central St.
• Peabody Elks Lodge, 38 Oak St.
• Holy Ghost Society Cultural Center, 20 Howley St.
• Shaw's Supermarket, 114 Essex Center Dr.
• Brooksby Farm Smith Barn, 54 Felton St.
• Community Covenant Church, 33 Lake St.
• West Church, 27 Johnson St.
• Hannaford Supermarket, 637 Lowell St.
• Northshore Mall, 210 Andover St.
• Torigian Family YMCA, 259 Lynnfield St.
• Centennial Industrial Park
• Peabody Municipal Light Plant, 201 Warren Street Ext.
• Public Services Department, 50 Farm Ave.
• Temple Ner Tamid, 368 Lowell St.
• Peabody City Hall, 24 Lowell St.