Update, October 2026: We have since read both attached documents in full. Cofske’s resignation letter alleges that Eagle Hill School’s leadership engineered a “change in leadership” on the incoming Select Board, naming newly-elected member H. Robert Ruggles, and describes the new Board as having “no relation with USDA nor any expertise on the situation at hand.” An undated addendum, signed “PJ” (consistent with then-Headmaster Peter J. McDonald, who Cofske’s letter accuses of harassing her), makes the opposite accusation: that then-Selectman Kenan Young and Cofske ran a years-long pressure campaign against Eagle Hill, and that USDA itself threatened to “look unfavorably upon a leadership change on the Board of Selectmen,” meaning pressure to keep Young and Cofske in place. The addendum also alleges DPC Engineering’s principal was a former disgruntled employee of Tighe and Bond, the firm DPC replaced on the sewer project.
We checked what we could. Ruggles was indeed newly elected in spring 2021 and an active participant in the sewer negotiations, consistent with Cofske’s account, though nothing confirms or refutes whether Eagle Hill specifically campaigned for him. We found no documentary support for the USDA “leadership change” threat or the DPC and Tighe and Bond claim. One specific complaint in the addendum does check out independently: a contemporaneous April 2021 email from the same author describes, in real time, the same “two-person fiefdom,” just the chair and the Town Administrator, running the Eagle Hill negotiations and excluding the public. In short, these are two competing, largely unverified accounts of the same conflict, with one detail on each side independently confirmed and the rest unresolved.