School Heads Voice Fears: Turnout On Tuesday At Polling Places May Disrupt Classes

By Charles Proctor, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Feb. 3–The high voter turnout predicted for Tuesday’s presidential primaries might thrill local politicians and state officials, but it has left another group nervous: school superintendents.

With so many polling locations around Connecticut at schools, superintendents and administrators across the state are facing the prospect of big crowds where visitor access is usually tightly controlled.

And though schools doing double duty as polling places is common, superintendents usually avoid high-turnout elections — typically in November — by planning to close schools far in advance. Primaries, which often have lighter turnout, are rarely given the same consideration.

But the highly competitive presidential races this year have caught school administrators by surprise. Many are now scrambling to find ways to cope with an influx of voters on a normal school day.

With the primaries looming, some administrators say worries over how to deal with them are reaching new heights.

“I’ve been a superintendent for 10 years, and in this job since 2000,” said David Larson, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents. “This is the first year I’ve seen this level of concern.”

Superintendents are worried about several potential problems on Super Tuesday. Traffic jams could result when school buses mesh with voters heading to the polls. And the use of gymnasiums and cafeterias for voting can interfere with classes.

The top concern, though, is safety. In an era in which worries over security and violence at schools have never been greater, administrators do not want people wandering school halls unchecked, even if they are there to cast ballots.

“It’s a different time,” Cromwell Superintendent Matt Bisceglia said. “We’ve had incidents in the not-too-distant past that didn’t happen in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s … with people who want to come into the schools with bad intentions.”

The projected turnout for the primaries this year has not eased those concerns. Typically, turnout for presidential primaries in Connecticut is light, as low as about 15 percent of registered voters, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz said.

But Bysiewicz predicted turnout on Super Tuesday could match or surpass the 43.3 percent mark set by the August 2006 primary, in which Ned Lamont beat Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the midterm Democratic race.

“I think the level of interest in this presidential contest is approaching or exceeding the level of interest in the Lamont-Lieberman race, on both sides of the aisle,” Bysiewicz said.

That projection was not lost on superintendents like Paul Smotas of East Lyme.

When Smotas found out the local registrar planned to use East Lyme High School as a primary polling spot, he lobbied to get the location moved. (It was, to the community center.) Otherwise, he said, he might have had to close all the district’s schools.

“Given the fact that there’s such a high interest level in the primaries,” Smotas said, “I thought [there were] going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of people who could come to the high school who have never come here before.”

Bysiewicz said she is sympathetic to the concerns of school administrators, and she recommended they request extra police officers or security guards for the primaries — something many superintendents said they have done.

Some, like Smotas, have also tried to have the polls moved. But many have been stymied by a state law that says polling locations for a presidential primary must be the same as the location in the November general election.

In smaller towns where a school is the only polling location, school administrators are expecting to have their hands full Tuesday. That’s the situation in Oxford, where the Quaker Farms School on Great Oak Road has been the sole place to cast a ballot since 2006.

Town residents voted to move elections to the school after a man was killed in a car accident outside town hall, the previous polling place, on the night of a Republican town committee primary. People complained that the conditions around town hall were unsafe.

Since then, administrators said they have struggled to keep the school secure as they weathered a local primary and budget referendums that stretched into December.

“It’s difficult to monitor the people in the building when students are in session,” Superintendent Judith A. Palmer said. She said she asked the registrar to move the polling location for the primaries, but it could not be done in time. Now, she’s planning on Tuesday being a regular school day — regular, that is, except for the two police officers she has requested at Quaker Farms.

Safety concerns also prompted Vernon school officials to decide to dismiss students early Tuesday.

Several years ago, a voter driving from Maple Street School hit a student, said Judith Beaudreau, the Democratic registrar of voters in Vernon. The child was not seriously injured, but the incident highlighted a safety problem.

Vernon Superintendent Richard Paskiewicz said sending children home early Tuesday will ease safety concerns and free up parking for voters.

Some superintendents decided to shift their calendars and cancel school for the primaries rather than deal with the crowds.

In Middletown, where eight of the district’s 11 schools will be used as polling places, Superintendent Michael Frechette said the decision to call off classes for the day was an easy one. “Parking is an issue,” Frechette said. “Safety is an issue.”

Seven of the eight schools serving as polling places are elementary schools, and in some of them, both the cafeteria and gymnasium will be used by voters. Given the likelihood of a big turnout, the school board took the advice of city officials and opted to cancel school.

“The information we got from downtown was that there are going to be big crowds,” Frechette said.

Contact Charles Proctor at cwproctor@courant.com.

Courant Staff Writers Daniela Altimari and David Owens contributed to this report.

—–

To see more of The Hartford Courant, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.courant.com/.

Copyright (c) 2008, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.