Seat likely to stay vacant until December.
It appears the vacant seat on the Spring-Ford Area School Board will stay that way — at least for a short while anyway.
The seat once held by former board member Todd Wolf, has sat vacant for nearly three months after he submitted a letter of resignation. The school board accepted the resignation in June and then had 30 days to choose a replacement.
The board chose not to act, meaning anyone from the district’s Region 2 could petition the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas to appoint someone to fill the spot. Neither candidate running for the seat in November, Kathleen Drennan and Clinton Jackson, has decided to do that.
And it seems no one else in the district has any interest in filling the seat tem- porarily either, said board President Joe Ciresi Monday.
“No one has applied for it,” he said. “As Mrs. Drennan and Mr. Jackson both alluded to, neither one of them wants to apply for it. They feel that it needs to go to the public since it’s so close to the election. So I would assume at this point that seat will remain empty until the November election and be filled in December by the public.”
If a judge were to appoint someone to fill the seat temporarily, it would only be for about three months before either Drennan or Jackson takes over in December. Ciresi said leaving the seat vacant is the right decision given the short time frame.
“I think it’s a fair process at this point,” Ciresi said. “If we had two years to go I think it would be different. But it’s so close to an election, it’s the best way to do it.”
Both Drennan and Jackson previously weighed in on the vacancy situation with Digital First Media.
In July Drennan flat out rejected the idea of peti- tioning a court to allow her to fill the seat adding she would not have accepted an appointment by the school board.
“My thoughts are that it has been at least 12months, maybe 16 months, since Todd Wolf has been there,” Drennan said. “So the fact that it would be open for two or three months, I don’t see the major difference fromthe way the board has conducted their business.”
Drennan said she felt voters should be the ones to decide who fills the seat when they go to the polls in No- vember and said appointing either candidate running for the spot would be unfair.
As for whether she would accept an appointment from either the board or from a judge, Drennan said she’s already told Ciresi she would not.
“I would not accept it,” she said. “It would go against my principles. It’s not for a judge to decide, it’s for the people to decide.”
In June Jackson said he felt the board needed to make a decision.
“I think the board needs to act on it and do something,” he said. “To do nothing, I think, is unfair. I understand both sides of it from previously serving on the board and going through this process previously. But I think the board needs to do something and not leave it in the hands of the courts.”
At the time, Jackson hadn’t decided whether he would petition a judge to fill the seat, saying he needed to weigh his op- tions and decide what was in the best interest of his campaign.
A Limerick resident, Wolf, 59, works as the president of the construction consulting firm Field General Inc. He cited personal reasons and business commitments in his May 26 letter to the board as to why he was stepping down. He did not seek reelection in the May 16 primary and missed most of the board meetings in the past year.
“If we had two years to go I think it would be different. But it’s so close to an election, it’s the bestway to do it.” — Joe Ciresi, SpringFord Area School Board president