GREENFIELD — In a year when the city’s School Committee will be tasked with remedying a strained relationship with City Council, eight candidates will face off for four vacant seats this fall.

The deadline for candidates to certify their names on the ballot and secure the required 100 signatures from registered voters passed Tuesday afternoon. Residents Pamela Goodwin, Jeffrey Diteman and Adrienne Craig-Williams are competing with Public Safety Commission Chair David Moscaritolo and At-Large City Councilor Michael Terounzo for three seats with four-year terms. The positions are currently held by School Committee members Melodie Goodwin and Elizabeth DeNeeve, who are both seeking to retain their seats. Additionally, resident Melissa Webb is running unopposed for a two-year term on the School Committee.

Given the unusually large number of School Committee candidates, Assistant City Clerk Quinn Jaquins said the city will hold a preliminary election on Sept. 9 to narrow the list of contenders in advance of the general election in November.

Elizabeth DeNeeve

DeNeeve, who was first elected to serve on the School Committee in 2021, received the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC) All-State School Committee award in 2024 for her efforts to advocate for school funding on the state level. This included her involvement in the Day on the Hill advocacy event that took place in Boston last May, where she and other Greenfield School Department members joined forces with school committees from the Gill-Montague Regional School District, Hadley Public Schools and the Mohawk Trail Regional School District to lobby for fiscal year 2025 education spending.

Should she be reelected in the fall, DeNeeve hopes to continue her efforts to advocate for additional school funding and also focus on the search for a new superintendent following Karin Patenaude’s resignation in May.

“I sort of made it my mission to become the legislative advocate for our district and by bringing all those school committees together, I truly believe that that’s how we got the per-pupil rate raised for the state of Massachusetts, and so that’s why I got that award. That’s the kind of improvement, innovation, partnership and relationship-building I’m going to bring to the next term and to the next six months of my current term,” DeNeeve said. “We have a new Community Engagement Subcommittee, and we’re going to be creating new relationships with the City Council, which we have also never done before. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring new avenues of expression and interaction with our constituents together as a group.”

Melodie Goodwin

Having been first appointed last year following the resignation of former School Committee Chair Amy Proietti, Goodwin said that if she is elected to continue serving on the School Committee, she hopes to focus on bringing more fiscal responsibility and transparent budgeting to the city.

Part of the work on fiscal responsibility and transparency, Goodwin added, was to hire a full-time business manager who is focused on only the Greenfield schools. She said in the fiscal year 2027 budgeting process, she believes specific line items in the education budget should be publicized, rather than the general spending figures.

“For me, it’s really about transparency around funding, looking at how we can improve our schools. We have an interim superintendent, we’re looking for a new superintendent. We’re looking at all our buildings, because we’re down to 1,300 children and we used to have almost 2,000, so a lot of our buildings are not being utilized the way they should,” Goodwin said. “I want to know what we’re paying for and just seeing a number doesn’t really give me the information I want as a taxpayer. If you’re going to hire four reading specialists, I want to know that.”

David Moscaritolo

Moscaritolo said he will continue to serve the rest of his three-year term on the Public Safety Commission in the event that he is elected to School Committee. He said he decided to run for School Committee because he believes the schools and committee “needed some attention,” particularly with how the department allocated its funds.

If elected, Moscaritolo said he plans to support a School Department budget that prioritizes funding for teachers, education and programs that directly benefit students, rather than directing funding to administrative roles. He added that he would like to work toward increasing literacy rates in the city, which he said are below the state average.

“The children and the teachers are the priority, and they are not financially getting what they need to be successful,” Moscaritolo said. “I believe that we’re spending way too much money on administrative and operational costs that aren’t needed. … I am pro a full school budget, but I feel like, fiscally, the budget is not being managed properly.”

Michael Terounzo

Terounzo said he had been “solicited” by a number of his constituents to run for School Committee after he had long expressed disappointment with its leadership.

Terounzo said he, too, believes the committee needs to operate with increased fiscal responsibility, and cited the department’s fiscal year 2025 budget planning as an example of the need for more transparent and responsible budgeting. He said his children attend Greenfield’s public schools, and he, a Greenfield native, “bleeds green and white,” so he hopes to make the school district the best that it can be.

“I’ve been very disappointed with them overall in the last couple of years, and the lack of response when us on Ways and Means [Committee] or City Council have requested information, when their own School Committee members requested information. There’s been a whole bunch of stonewalling and this committee hasn’t been playing nice with the other city departments,” Terounzo said. “The council kind of got thrown under the bus this year with our decision to not give [the School Department] extra money. I was one of those votes, and mostly the reason was because they already had the money. They had money squirreled away that they could be using, and I would prefer them to use their own rainy day fund before they ask the city to use [its] rainy day fund.”

Jeffrey Diteman

Diteman, a teacher at Pioneer Valley Regional School whose kids attend Greenfield’s public schools, said he is running for School Committee to support programs that will help increase literacy rates among Greenfield’s youth and raise morale among students.

Noting that the school district, in some ways, “never fully recovered” from the pandemic, Diteman said he would use his role on the committee to support programs that encourage interaction between students and the community at large. He said community events such as high school sports games and public poetry contests help raise morale among students and revitalize the city.

“A public high school can be an important hub of the community and can be one of the few things that brings people together across all kinds of different strata of social class and other demographics,” Diteman said. “I’m very, very concerned about literacy, extremely concerned. There’s something that has happened with the screen kids’ generation, where they’re falling behind in literacy and an interest in reading, and many kids are getting all the way through high school without ever really having read a book and even going to college without ever really reading a book. … There are strategies for improving that, and that’s why I think integrating the literary arts community in the valley with the schools might help.”

Pamela Goodwin

Goodwin said she has decades of experience working as a teacher and she hopes to restore the committee’s adherence to “Robert’s Rules of Order,” claiming that she has noticed the committee will, from time to time, make decisions without a formal vote.

Goodwin added that the School Department could benefit from more transparent budgeting, as well as a less “top-heavy” budget that allocates more funding to teachers and ground-level services rather than administrative positions. She added that as the city’s funds get tighter, the department might benefit from entering a regional school district with neighboring towns.

“In the state of Massachusetts, post-COVID, there’s just been a lot of chaos and a lot of needy kids who are still adjusting to having had that remote learning. … There isn’t going to be a bunch of money flowing from City Hall to the school system, so then it becomes a matter of who we’re going to cut. Are we cutting teachers? Are we cutting programs? Are we cutting sports?” Goodwin said. “This whole redistricting thing that blew everybody’s mind, when they thought they had a plan and then it was, ‘No, we can’t do that’ — that’s a big disappointment for administrators who worked on it and committee members, but sometimes, you just have to start all over again and see what’s different, what’s new. You don’t have to have a great big high school for 300 kids.”

Adrienne Craig-Williams

Craig-Williams is a Stoneleigh-Burnham School teacher who moved to Greenfield two years ago after working as a teacher both in New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York. She said she decided to run for School Committee because she “loves the community in Greenfield,” and she hopes to support teachers and students in any way possible.

Craig-Williams explained that, if elected, she would want to support teachers on the ground and mentioned helping LGBTQ youth.

“I have a lot of experience in a lot of different school settings. I’ve been a public school teacher, a boarding school teacher, private school teacher, and I just have a lot of diverse experience that I’m hoping to bring in terms of different knowledge. … I want to focus on defending students from [the discrimination] that’s happening, trans students and queer students,” Craig-Williams said. “Supporting teachers on the ground will improve student outcomes, especially with class sizes, and paying teachers improves retention of teachers.”

Melissa Webb

Running uncontested for a two-year seat on the School Committee, Webb, who has three children attending school in the district, said she hopes to help bridge the gap between parents and committee members.

Webb said she wants to help ensure that families feel like their voices are being heard when the committee makes decisions about their children’s education.

“Greenfield Public Schools has a lot to offer, and I’d like to be part of keeping Greenfield moving forward,” Webb said. “I just really want to make sure the parent voice is heard. A lot of decisions are made by people who are not boots on the ground or in schools or showing up to events at the schools or volunteering in the schools or organizing.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.