The crowd at JJ’s Tavern in Florence was anxiously watching a big-screen TV on Tuesday night, the dull hum of conversation occasionally punctuated by both cheers and sighs as party-goers exchanged nervous looks.
The election night watch party was organized by Al Simon, a City Council hopeful in Northampton’s Ward 2 and one of the candidates backed by the Support Our Schools movement, which had made increased funding of the city’s schools a central issue on the campaign trail.
“We are going to make public education the priority it should be in this city,” is how Simon described it on the microphone at the watch party.
And the Northampton contingent wasn’t alone. After municipalities faced budget crunches and educator layoffs in recent years, candidates across the region ran on similar messages: increase school funding. In some cases, like in Northampton and Amherst, educators’ unions weighed in with their own endorsements.
But overall, school-funding candidates saw mixed results on Tuesday evening.
In Northampton, for example, SOS-backed candidates only won four of the nine seats on the City Council. And in the race for mayor, unofficial results showed Jillian Duclos, the SOS candidate, lost by just 76 votes to incumbent Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra out of 9,401 ballots cast. The city’s educators union, the Northampton Association of School Employees, endorsed the same slate of candidates, including for School Committee, where they had more success. Of the nine School Committee candidates the groups endorsed, eight were elected to office, though five of those ran unopposed.
“Win or lose, we made a splash,” Duclos told The Shoestring. Meg Robbins, who was the top vote getter in the four-way race for two at-large seats on the City Council, said that the night was the first step in the building of a movement. “Two years passes very quickly,” she said.
Elsewhere, in Greenfield, a six-way race for three School Committee seats was contested by two different slates: three progressive-backed candidates and three others who came together in opposition to that slate. The two groups were split on questions of school funding and whether to put a police officer in the city’s schools.
In the end, two of the candidates from the progressive slate won seats. But the top vote getter on the evening was Melodie Goodwin, a current School Committee member. She and Mayor Virginia “Ginny” Desorgher were the only School Committee members to vote against asking the City Council for a $350,000 increase in the school budget to bring it closer to level services. Goodwin campaigned on a message of increasing scrutiny of how the city was spending its education funding.
“Right now, we’ve been doing the same old thing for the last five years” increasing the school budget by 3%, Goodwin said at a recent candidate forum. “Instead, we need to go down to zero and rebuild. And one of the things that needs to happen is we need to look at why families are leaving Greenfield and respond to that, and we have not been doing that.”
Elizabeth DeNeeve was one of the candidates who won re-election on the progressive slate, which had the backing of groups like Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution and Greenfield People’s Budget.
“I think that it happens over and over again that the people of Greenfield come out to vote because they care about school funding,’ DeNeeve said. “They want to see their schools fully funded.”
DeNeeve did say, though, that a ballot question in front of Greenfield voters likely boosted turnout. If approved, the measure would have reversed the City Council’s decision to sell a parking lot on Hope Street to a developer to build housing or a mixed-use building. In a final tally of 2,254 to 1,657, voters rejected the question.
DeNeeve said that during her time on the School Committee, elected members from Greenfield and other municipalities across the region began to advocate collectively for more education funding at the state level. She said that kind of coalition building across school committees hadn’t previously happened.
“It makes a difference when we go as a group,” she said. “I think that we have already seen direct change occur in per-pupil funding from the state and now [state Sen. Jo Comerford] is helping to revisit the chapter 70 funding formula,” which is how the state determines how to distribute education aid.
In Amherst, only three out of the seven Town Council candidates backed by the educators union, the Amherst-Pelham Education Association, were elected. And in a six-person race for five seats on the School Committee, three of the union’s four endorsed candidates won.
One of those Town Council candidates elected was Jill Brevik, an active member in Amherst’s own Support Our Schools group as well as a co-founder of Valley Families for Palestine.
In a previous interview with The Shoestring, Brevik said she had been inspired to run for office in part by democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who on Tuesday night won his own election. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group whose local chapter in western Massachusetts decided to endorse a handful of candidates for the first time this election cycle. Two of those candidates, Brevik and incumbent Agawam City Councilor Tom Hendrickson, were elected Tuesday.
Despite the mixed results, though, organizers who spoke to The Shoestring said Tuesday was just the beginning for them.
Back at the Northampton watch party, one SOS organizer, Nykole Roche, stood among a crowd of others who, like her, came from the local labor movement. Watching the results trickle in, she and others were already focused on next steps. In speeches to supporters, they talked about organizing around the next city budget and bringing their organizing to every level of city government.
“This is step one of a community effort, driven by parents and unions, to take back our city and build back public services,” Roche told The Shoestring. “See you in two years.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correctly identify who organized the election night watch party in Florence. It was City Council candidate Al Simon.