Copyright MassLive
SPRINGFIELD — A flood of educators arriving for training at the same time voters sought to cast early morning ballots at Rebecca Johnson Elementary School has raised concerns that some residents were dissuaded from voting because of the snarl of traffic around the building. Outside around 9:45 a.m., vehicles filled nearly space in the front of the school. One vehicle sat parked on a sidewalk running along the building, and others filled up rows in a nearby baseball field. A woman who had just voted walked to her red Subaru, which she parked in a travel lane in the parking lot behind the school. Polls opened across the city at 7 a.m. By around 8:15 a.m., administrators at Rebecca Johnson realized they had a problem with parking, said Azell Cavaan, spokesperson for Springfield Public Schools. Election Day is a professional development day for the city’s educators, Cavaan said, and a variety of trainings are held in schools across the city. The number of educators that showed up at the training at the Rebecca Johnson school was “far greater than expected,” Cavaan said, and took administrators by surprise. Staff, she said, moved their vehicles to a baseball field behind the building, and city police worked to keep spaces open in front of the building, she said. School officials, she said, reached out to city election officials, but they had not “heard of any dissatisfaction” from either City Hall or any voters, Cavaan said. “The last thing we want to do is impede access to the polls,” Cavaan said. By mid-morning, a hallway separated the polling location and the Springfield educators gathered in the school’s auditorium to discuss working with special needs students. A slide projected on a screen discussed “supporting unmet need.” Some educators sat in chairs that spilled out of the auditorium doors and into the hallway. Across the hall, election officials were monitoring the polls for two wards. An election official at the polling location not authorized to speak with the press said the training caught poll workers off guard. Arriving educators were walking through the polling location, and others wandered in looking for chairs. A poll worker was late because they had to park three blocks away, the election official said, and the traffic jam prevented one person they know, a disabled resident who sought to cast her ballot before work, from entering the building. Outside the school, Willie James Naylor, running for a spot on Springfield City Council, waved to voters while holding a worn campaign sign. He likened the congestion earlier that morning to a school day. “It causes a barrier to voter access to the polls, because there’s no place to park,” Naylor said. Darryl Williams, a volunteer holding a sign for Malo Brown, said the traffic was “terrible” and that vehicles were backed up to a light down Catherine Street. When he left around 9:15 a.m. to run an errand, less than 40 voters cast ballots at the location, he said. “Typically, it’s better than that,” Williams said.
