BERNE — All four members of the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School Board who were present at a special meeting on Thursday morning voted to appoint Carli Elble to teach for a year at the elementary school here. The fifth member — her husband, Nathan Elble — was absent.

The appointment was made at a 7 a.m. meeting on Thursday, following a lengthy discussion over hiring protocol at Tuesday’s regular school board meeting. At Tuesday’s meeting, three board members had abstained — Elble, Helen Lounsbury, and Randy Bashwinger — stalling the appointment.

As the board struggled on Tuesday to find a common meeting time for the special session, Nathan Elble, the board’s vice president, said he couldn’t be there at 7 a.m. Thursday but, since he would abstain anyway, the board could go ahead and schedule the meeting then.

The 7 a.m. meeting on Thursday lasted just over an hour, said district Clerk Anne Farnam.

Carli Elble will be filling in for two married elementary school teachers who are having a baby: sixth-grade teacher Rebecca Dergosits will take off the first half of next year, and third-grade teacher Bill Dergosits will take off the second half. The post will run from Sept. 4, 2018, to June 26, 2019, with a salary of $40,506.

Questions had arisen Tuesday over the hiring process for Carli Elble and four other teachers. Lounsbury noted that Elble’s appointment in particular was being scrutinized because she said, “We don’t want to be accused of nepotism.”

Superintendent Timothy Mundell had said at Tuesday’s meeting that 175 candidates had applied for postings to teaching vacancies at BKW. A team of staff and administrators screened the applicants, paring the list to 15 to interview, and ending with six viable candidates. The group then watched the candidates perform “demo lessons” for the grades they would be teaching, Mundell said.

Concerns were raised at Tuesday’s meeting that the job had not been re-posted, and board members were interested in seeing the scoring rubric for the candidates.

Elble was appointed last year as a teaching assistant at BKW; her husband also abstained from voting on that appointment. Carli Elble told The Enterprise on Thursday that she has served on the BKW Parent Teacher Association for the last five years, and has been the vice president of the PTA for the last two.

Elble said she studied education at The College of Saint Rose, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 2004, and is currently working toward a master’s degree in education there. She and her husband have four children, three of whom attend BKW.

She is looking forward to teaching English Language Arts — which she studied as her minor — and teaching sixth-grade students.

“I think there’s something special about that age group,” she said.