Thursday evening, Feb. 5, Wiscasset school committee member Victoria Hugo-Vidal resigned, because she is no longer a Wiscasset resident. The resignation is effective immediately, Hugo-Vidal wrote in the email to Chair Tracey Whitney and cc’d to Superintendent of Schools Dr. Kim Andersson. 

“Thank you for the opportunity to serve this community,” Hugo-Vidal wrote. 

Andersson provided the email at Wiscasset Newspaper’s request Feb. 9 after the paper saw “school committee vacancy” on the school committee’s  Feb. 11 agenda.

Also that night, the committee is set to look at a proposed update to the unexpired terms policy. 

Fielding questions recently, Andersson had confirmed to Wiscasset Newspaper the reason the school committee’s policy committee had been reviewing that policy. “I had pulled the policy to review in case our fifth board member (Victoria Hugo-Vidal) chooses to end her term early. When I saw (the policy’s wording), I was aghast at the incomplete and almost nonsensical sentences! So we selected to work on it,” Andersson said.

The version approved in 2023 reads in part: "After public notice of at least 14 days of the vacancy, the candidate, appointed by the School Committee majority vote of voting members present and must reside in the town of the vacancy."

"I struggled reading these sentences. They don't really make sense to me," Andersson told the policy committee Jan. 28.

Participants discussed having the policy say the school committee may, within 30 days of the vacancy's being declared, appoint a resident of the town to fill a vacancy until the next town election.

Hart asked, why "may" appoint?

"Maybe you choose not to. Maybe there's no one who will do it," Andersson said. "You just decide not to do it, like, you can do it, but you have to find a person who's willing to do it." She recalled Eugene Stover many years ago saying, usually they had to beat the bushes to find someone to serve. 

The three-year term Hugo-Vidal has vacated is months from expiring; Hugo-Vidal was unopposed on the ballot in June 2023, according to Wiscasset Newspaper files. 

The school department is nearly done updating all its policies and will get them on a track to keep them up to date, Andersson said. Among the batch the policy committee reviewed Jan. 28, besides the unexpired terms one, was one on staff conduct with students. 

Andersson explained later, she and the school committee and its policy committee have been “tackling the policies in date order, working on the oldest ones first. We are almost done with this work and then will be on a schedule to review policies every three years. This is the end of a huge multi-year task of catching up and making all our policies current,” Andersson said.  

She said the one on staff conduct with students “just came up in our rotation.” With the policy committee Jan. 28, she suggested the policy say not to belittle or be otherwise mean to students. 

"I completely agree," Whitney said about addressing that in the policy. Participants noted this type of conduct could broadly fall under harassment, which was already in the wording. Whitney then asked, "Do you have to prove intent for (it to be) harassment?"

"No, it could be unintentional," Andersson said. "You could absolutely not intend to harm someone by ... always joking about 'You're late every day,' 'Oh, there's your bed head again.'"

"'Thank you for joining us,'" committee member Christopher Hart gave as another example.

Participants eyed saying, when using humor, staff are "expected to be sensitive to students' developmental level," as Whitney put it. She said students might take an adult's remark as "actual criticism."

Andersson will get back to the policy committee after she sees what other school departments have for wording.