Wicked Local
PLYMOUTH – Margie Burgess won her first seat on the Plymouth School Committee the hard way. She lost it in the same fashion.
Twenty-three years after winning her first election for the school board, Burgess was ousted Saturday by a newcomer who failed in her first bid to fill a vacancy just months earlier. Burgess did the same thing in 1998, getting the nod from voters after town officials gave her a pass.
In a five-candidate race for three three-year terms Saturday, Burgess was edged out of a seat on the board by Katherine Jackson by 290 votes. Board Chairman Kim Savery Hunt and member Vedna Heywood won re-election to the Committee with 3,086 votes and 2,811 votes, respectively.
Wicked Local
PLYMOUTH – In a normal year, Alex Cardoso would be leading a group of excited kids on the trip of a lifetime this week.
The Plymouth North High School math teacher has led student trips to Costa Rica, Iceland, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands in recent years and, this week, he should be in Peru for a week-long adventure capped by a visit to Machu Picchu.
That train trip through the Sacred Valley to the fabled Lost City of the Inca went the way of last year’s scrubbed trip to Belize, however, for Cardoso and dozens of students.
Wicked Local
The Rev. Barbara Simmons is a church pastor; Vedna Heywood is a trauma nurse - both Black women say they are reluctant teachers as well.
Sisters of the South, Simmons and Heywood made their way north to Massachusetts in vastly different eras, but both have encountered racism that they say they cannot ignore or let go unnoticed and unmentioned.
It can be a burden at times, like when they’re running errands or just going about their jobs, but Simmons and Heywood don’t hesitate to teach people the error of biased ways.
“No matter what occupation we’re in, we have to constantly teach in addition to the job we have to do. It’s just a constant, teaching all the time, and it kind of wears you down,” said Simmons, who has been pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Plymouth for 17 years.
Plymouth families look to homeschooling as alternative to hybrid learning plan
Wicked Local
PLYMOUTH - With six children under the age of 13, Kathy Bom Conselho faced a difficult decision as the town contemplated a return to classes last summer.
Bom Conselho already had issues with the multiple platforms and programs her four school-age children had been learning under last spring. The Manomet woman learned the hard way that the Chromebook the district sent home with her oldest child last spring didn’t have parental controls.
Bom Conselho didn’t relish the thought of having her children spending so much time on computer screens anyway, but the prospect of keeping her incoming first-grader connected with her teacher and classmates from home finally forced her hand.