4-04-2022 5:49pm

Sheila Hanley, Helping Westwood Residents Become Informed Voters

Darlene Cancell Editor

Photo by Kevin Longval. Pictured is Ms. Sheila Hanley, the coordinator of League of Women Voter's upcoming Candidate Forum and a long-time volunteer in the Westwood community.

Thanks to the League of Women Voters (LWV) and volunteers like Sheila Hanley, Westwood residents will again have the opportunity to hear directly from candidates running for town election before casting their votes. It’s an opportunity that LWV has offered to the community for at least the last fifty years, according to one LWV member.

Ms. Hanley is coordinator of the upcoming 2022 Westwood Candidate Forum that will be hosted by the Westwood/Walpole/Dedham Chapter of the LWV. It will be livestreamed by Westwood Media Center on April 13, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. It will also be broadcast live on Comcast Channel 12 and Verizon Channel 42.

Without taking any sides, Ms. Hanley’s job as coordinator of the forum includes briefing the moderator on the issues that have been important to Westwood of late. To promote non-partisanship, the moderator is always a non-resident, ideally from a similar, nearby town, but she can come from farther away, as well. This year, the moderator will be Marlene Warner, a resident of Salem.

Along with background information from Ms. Hanley, Ms. Warner will accept suggested questions posed from the community through April 11, 2022. With background on the issues and the community’s suggested questions in hand, Ms. Warner will then select what questions she chooses to pose to the candidates.

There are two contested races in which more candidates are vying for positions than are available. In the race for the one-year term on Planning Board, Philip Giordano is running against incumbent Thomas McCusker. In the second race, Dorothy “Dori” Parmelee, Heather Morrison, and incumbent Anthony Mullin are running for the two available seats for a three-year term on School Committee.

Without giving anything away, Ms. Hanley states that broad topics for School Committee candidates could include school curricula and the issue of diversity, equity and inclusion. On town planning issues, she notes that the topics of Hale Reservation and Westwood’s Comprehensive Planning Document could be fair game.

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A Westwood resident since 1988, Ms. Hanley was herself a candidate for School Committee, perhaps around thirty years ago when her two sons were in elementary school. She didn’t win, but in the process of running for election, she says she learned a lot about this town and about voters of that time.

She remembers being asked what male candidates were running, with the implication that the questioner was only interested in voting for a man. A voter also once told her that the person was voting for Ms. Hanley because she had a likable surname. These are some reasons why Ms. Hanley says she is so active on the issue of educating voters. Voters should be informed and vote with knowledge of the issues, rather than voting based on the name of the candidate or to whom the candidate married, she says. “It’s a civic responsibility,” notes Ms. Hanley.

Many years ago, to ensure that voters had access to information, Ms. Hanley undertook training to use video recording equipment from the local cable station, which was then based in Norwood. She would take the equipment to Westwood School Committee meetings, record what happened, and turn in the tape into the cable station for airing. Because Ms. Hanley herself did not subscribe to cable at the time, she says she could never see how well she had performed with the task of recording. But she continued to tape the meetings as a pet project because she felt that it was critical for people to see what was happening on School Committee.

Nowadays, Ms. Hanley notes that access to become informed on the issues has significantly changed. Zoom has allowed voters to attend meetings that they otherwise could not, she says. The option of either physical attendance or remote attendance has opened up opportunities for more people to be informed. Easier access helps people become and remain a part of the community, she observes.

Thanks to Ms. Sheila Hanley for speaking with Westwood Minute.