Mount Greylock Moving Forward with Cost-Share Plan
 Williamstown School Committee member Adams Filson responds to comments at Mount Greylock. |
"I think this has the potential to be a good experiment but I'm not ready to vote on it tonight," said School Committee member Heather Williams, who wanted a final draft of the language first.
The committee spent more than two hours at an unusual Friday night meeting to going over the 13 points to the agreement with input from the district's legal counsel Fred Dupere and Williamstown School Committee members Adam Filson and David Backus, both of whom worked on the feasibility committee with Carrie Greene of Mount Greylock.
The board chopped the number of seats on the proposed administrative review subcommittee in half, from eight to four, and cleaned up and expanded on what they felt was ambiguous language.
The school district and the union, made up of the Williamstown and Lanesborough school districts, began discussing an agreement months ago as a way to share the cost of administrators — superintendent, business director and special education director and, if they so agree, special education and curriculum coordinators and an administrative assistant to the superintendent.
The deal nearly went down in flames two weeks ago when the state said the months of work were for naught because regional districts can't join superintendency unions, only towns. Dupere said after the meeting it was a matter of straightening out wording — the regional district's not joining the union but striking a cost-sharing deal with it.
Committee members, however, expressed concern over whether one board or another would have greater control over the advisory board and the fact that, as originally constituted, both Lanesborough (with two members) and Mount Greylock (with four) would have quorums on the review subcommittee.
 School Committee members Heather Williams and Robert Ericsson and counsel Fred Dupere. |
The review subcommittee will be responsible for developing the superintendent contract, job descriptions and evaluation procedures; the school committees will be responsible for the evaluations.
The administration sharing is in part driven by the coming retirement of William Travis, superintendent of Mount Greylock (School Union 71, too, was prompted two years ago in part by the retirement of a superintendent). The savings will be minimal but are expected to open up new possibilities for staffing. Both co-Principals Ellen Kaiser and Tim Payne expressed excitement at the potential changes.
"You do yourself a favor by empowering the principals at the building level," said Payne, while Kaiser, who's been pulling double duty as business manager, was eager to get back to work on her real field — curriculum. "I'm ready to step up to the plate."
 David Langston was the lone no vote. |
He urged a longer time line and a serious look at real structural integration.
"To say that this doesn't work for anybody is simply not true," replied Greene, saying there were towns and school districts that have been using this sharing system for years. "They figure out every single year and every single contract season how to share the staff because they can't afford not to."
The board will take up the revised agreement at its next meeting on May 11.
In other business, the committee:
- Approved the transfer of $60,000 from the Student Activities Savings Account to the checking account to cover end-of-the-year activities.
- Accepted the lowest bid of $425,580 from Adams Heating & Plumbing to complete the second phase of the heating system upgrade. Committee member Robert Ericsson, who is acting as project manager, said he would have the bids for the locker room reconstruction and a time line for the project at the May 11 meeting.
The draft agreement discussed Friday night in PDF form.
