WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday began consideration of whether it wants to send its member towns fiscal year 2027 assessments that are 12 to 13 percent higher than the bills Lanesborough and Williamstown paid for the current school year.

 

The committee held a special meeting with a single item on the agenda: the draft FY27 budget prepared by the administration.

 

That spending plan, which comes with no net increase in staffing or services, would result in an 11.73 percent increase in the assessment to Lanesborough (up by $801,742 from FY26) and a 12.71 percent increase to Williamstown (up by $1,883,944).

 

The draft budget could address some of the needs expressed by the school councils in each of the district's three schools. But it does so by reallocating positions in the FY26 budget and without adding any full-time equivalent positions (FTEs), Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the School Committee.

 

Both Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary listed the addition of a math interventionist as one of their top priorities for FY27 in presentations given to the School Committee over the last couple of months.

 

"Both elementary schools have potential paths to gaining math interventionists," Bergeron said. "The increases that you see within what we have here, meaning the 12 and 13 percent increases, those embed with them the ability to gain those math interventionists within the staffing. In order to do that, we would need to move pieces around within schools.

 

"If we wanted to … purely increase FTEs in order to achieve math interventionists at the elementary schools coming in from the outside? Each town's budget would need to increase by about another $100,000, and that equates to increasing each town's percentage [increase] by another .4 to .5 percent."