July 17, 2020 | Posted: May 18, 2020 | Page Ivey
Kassandra Gove, ’09 higher education administration, knows her educational background doesn’t immediately say “elect me as your mayor.”
Yet, last year she was elected the fifth mayor of her hometown of Amesbury — population 17,000 — about 40 miles north of Boston on the coast of Massachusetts. She is the first Amesbury native elected to the office, as well as the first woman and the youngest person.
“I have had an unusual career path,” says Gove, who came to the University of South Carolina’s higher education master’s program with a bachelor’s degree in dance education from Jacksonville University in Florida. “I had no interest in politics, no experience in politics, no one in my family had been in politics.”
She got interested when she was working at the local chamber of commerce. She heard from business owners and prospective businesses looking to relocate to the town how difficult it was to get through red tape at City Hall. So she decided to run and now she is at the helm of the former mill town during the worst public health crisis in 100 years.
“We have some high numbers,” Gove says of the more than 150 COVID-19 cases reported for her town, where many residents commute to Boston every day for work. “There’s sort of a ripple effect from our urban areas.”
Among the city’s 500 employees, only one — a firefighter — has been diagnosed and he was caught by a temperature screening before he went into a city building. “We have some pretty rigorous screening protocols in place,” she says, adding that the firefighter has fully recovered.
It has been interesting to see how quickly we modernized the delivery of services. We’ve been able to do a lot of things online and remotely.
Kassandra Gove, '09 master's in higher ed administration and mayor of Amesbury, Massachusetts
Gove credits some of the things she learned at UofSC for helping her navigate the waters of small-town politics, especially the “Trends in Higher Education” class taught by Dennis Pruitt, vice president for student affairs and vice provost.