Eleanor “Ellie” Wilson to join Holyoke School Committee

HOLYOKE — Voters decided three contests for School Committee seats on Tuesday.

Races were contested for an at-large seat as well as the seats in Ward 4 and Ward 7. And the School Committee will have a new chair after Joshua Garcia was elected mayor.

Mildred Lefebvre won election to the open at-large seat, defeating Marc Hickey 4,170 votes to 2,474 votes. A School Committee member representing Ward 1 for the past seven years, Lefebvre is currently the School Committee’s vice chair.

In Ward 4, incumbent Irene Feliciano-Sims defeated challenger Faizul Sibdhanny 445 votes to 144 votes. Feliciano-Sims is the director for employment and community inclusion services at the disability advocacy and support organization Viability. She has served on the School Committee since 2014.

In Ward 7, former Holyoke Public Schools educator Eleanor “Ellie” Wilson won 1,035 votes to defeat Colleen Chesmore, who received 725 votes.

In other wards, no candidate ran in Ward 1. Incumbents Rosalee Tensley Williams, Rebecca Birks, John Whelihan and William R. Collamore won in wards 2, 3, 5 and 6, respectively.

Though Holyoke elects its own School Committee, the powers usually given to a municipality’s school board are in the hands of a state-appointed receiver in Holyoke as the city’s schools have been in state receivership since 2015.