Harvard voters who go to the polls for the state’s primary election on Tuesday, Sept. 4, will find a few changes as they enter and leave the Bromfield School. Instead of entering Bromfield’s main door and following the hallway around to the cafeteria, voters will go straight into the cafeteria through one of its two outside doors. After voting, they will leave through the other outside door.
The state set the date for this primary election after Harvard’s School Committee had already established the school calendar for 2018-2019, with Sept. 4 scheduled as a full day of school. And a full school day means that students need their lunch, so kids will be eating in one section of the cafeteria while voters are casting their ballots in another. The two sections will be separated by a temporary partition.
School Superintendent Linda Dwight said the new pattern for entering and leaving improves security at Bromfield, with less of the school building open to the public while students are in classrooms and hallways.
Dwight has asked the town to consider moving future elections to another location because of increasing concerns over school security. She told the Press she plans to ask the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents for information about how many towns still use schools as polling places and, for those that do, what kinds of security measures they put in place.
“We are so careful of security the rest of the days of the year,” Dwight said, “and we need to be on this [election] day as well.”
The school calendar already designates Tuesday, Nov. 6, when this year’s state and federal elections will be held, as a no-school day, with teachers using the full day for professional development. For Harvard voters, that day will also feature a Special Town Election to fill the vacancy on the Select Board created by Ken Swanton’s resignation.
