PORTSMOUTH — Terri Cortvriend, who is running as a write-in candidate to keep her seat on the School Committee, yesterday received personal endorsements from two prominent Democrats, state Sen. Charles J. Levesque and state Rep. Amy G. Rice.

Levesque and Rice said yesterday that Cortvriend, the top vote-getter in the School Committee race four years ago, has been tireless in her efforts to preserve a high quality public education in town.

They spoke at a news conference at the playground on Turnpike Avenue attended by about a dozen supporters, including School Committee Chairwoman Sylvia Wedge and another committee member, Marjorie Levesque, both Democrats.

Levesque said the most important consideration in his endorsement is selecting the candidate with the town’s best interests at heart. He elaborated by telephone later in the day.

“As my friend Jim Seveney always says, ‘the first thing you have to think about is what’s good for Portsmouth.’ Terri Cortvriend and Sylvia Wedge are best for Portsmouth and our schools,” Levesque said.

Seveney, vice president of the Town Council, is also chairman of the nominating committee of the Democratic Town Committee, which by all accounts would have endorsed Cortvriend earlier this year for one of the three open seats on the School Committee.

But Cortvriend, preoccupied with her family business, was unable to commit to a run for reelection at the time.

The nominating panel instead endorsed two newcomers, Angela Volpicelli, a registered nurse, and Marilyn King, a special education teacher, along with Wedge, the incumbent chairwoman of the School Committee.

Levesque suggested that the views of King and Volpicelli do not reflect the leadership of the Democratic party but are more representative of Portsmouth Concerned Citizens, the taxpayer group that has been a thorn in the side of incumbent Democrats on the School Committee.

Portsmouth Concerned Citizens endorsed King and Volpicelli in a newsletter distributed to members shortly before a Democratic primary last month. In the same newsletter, the group criticized Wedge and Cortvriend for their positions on fiscal matters.

King and Volpicelli had already received Democratic endorsements.

But Levesque, who served on the Democratic nominating committee, said he was disappointed in the statements made by Volpicelli and King during the campaign.

All the candidates seeking endorsement were given as much information as possible “from the people doing the job,” Levesque said.

In the case of the School Committee, the candidates heard from Wedge, Levesque and E. Richard Carpender, another Democratic incumbent who, like Marjorie Levesque, is in the middle of a four-year term and is not up for re-election.

When “the next thing you hear is a recitation distorting those facts, there’s a problem there,” Levesque said of Volpicelli and King .

The pair, issuing statements nearly identical in substance, have maintained that a one-year rollover of the teachers’ contract shortchanged teachers and that a new three-year agreement for Schools Supt. Susan F. Lusi was too generous.

King and Volpicelli criticized a lawsuit filed by the schools against the town early in 2007 to regain funding cut by voters at a special town meeting in a taxpayer revolt organized by Portsmouth Concerned Citizens.

Cortvriend, along with Wedge, Carpender and Marjorie Levesque, had voted to move forward with the suit after an audit of the budget showed that the schools could not meet their legal obligations on the amount of money the special Financial Town Meeting had given them.

For the most part, the committee prevailed in court, with the PCC making an unsuccessful attempt to intervene.

Levesque said he has known Volpicelli and King a long time, and they are “very nice people.”

“The nominating committee did a good job” at the time, he said, but “sometimes things emerge later that make wise decisions seem not so wise.”

In the primary, Volpicelli and King were tied as the top vote-getters, with 669 each. Wedge had 668 votes and Cortvriend, who ran as an unendorsed Democrat, trailed Wedge by 31 votes.

Since Republicans fielded no candidates for School Committee, it appeared that the top three Democrats faced no opposition on the ballot in November and were assured the election.

Cortvriend’s candidacy has changed that assumption, although Cortvriend acknowledges that she has a tough battle ahead of her.

At the news conference, state Rep. Amy G. Rice said Cortvriend is “a strong advocate for quality education for the children on Aquidneck Island.”

In her “steadfast commitment to education and [in] her governance role, Terri has been a true leader for Portsmouth these past four years,” she said.

As a graduate of the leadership academy of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, Rice said, Cortvriend “brings proven training and skills to the School Committee,” Rice said.

Cortvriend has put up a Web site to promote her candidacy at www.terricortvriend.com.

gmacris@projo.com