image description — The ad hoc regionalization committee voted to recommend pursuit of combining the high school district with its elementary feeders.

Mount Greylock Study Group Recommends Regional Expansion

By Stephen Dravis03:46AM / Friday, June 21, 2013Print Story | Email Story

Union 71 Superintendent Rose Ellis, left, and Mount Greylock Regional School Committee members Carolyn Greene and Chris Dodig participate in Thursday's meeting of the Regional District Amendment Committee.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The committee formed to study expansion of the Mount Greylock Regional School District voted Thursday evening to recommend that the School Committee pursue a Grades PK-through-12 district.

But after five months of study, the Regional District Agreement Committee also decided that the elected School Committee continue studying the mechanism by which the Williamstown and Lanesborough elementary schools might be added to the existing junior-senior high school.

The ad hoc committee created by the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee held its final official meeting on Thursday, taking the opportunity to discuss the feedback it received at a pair of public forums earlier in the week.

Based partly on the feedback from Tuesday's meeting in Williamstown, several committee members expressed concern that the financial aspects of regional expansion need more study.

When the committee was faced with a straight up and down vote on whether to recommend PK-12 regionalization, three members of the 12-member panel voted against taking such a measure.

"I'm not in a position to take what seems to me like a very final vote," said Dan Caplinger, a member of the Williamstown School Committee who indicated he was not voting against regionalization but rather against the notion that all questions have been answered that need to be addressed.

Caplinger voted in the minority against an unequivocal recommendation to the Mount Greylock committee, which has the authority to ask Williamstown and Lanesborough voters to approve PK-12 regionalization at town meeting.

Later, Caplinger moved that the RDAC add a complementary recommendation that the Mount Greylock committee "move forward with further investigation of the PK-12 regionalization."

The RDAC voted 9-1-2 to send along Caplinger's recommendation along with its initial recommendation. The one member to vote against the "investigation" motion was Lanesoborough Finance Committee member Al Terranova, who made the initial motion to recommend regionalization without elaboration.

Terranova characterized Caplinger's motion as a "minority report" rather than a complement to his motion.

Tags: elementary schools, MGRHS, regionalization,

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Lanesborough Chooses New Town Administrator

By Sabrina DammsiBerkshires Staff
09:19PM / Tuesday, October 06, 2026

LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — The Select Board has named longtime Easthampton official John Mason as the new town administrator after interviewing him and one other candidate on Tuesday.

About 45 applications were received. Eleven were brought before the seven-member selection committee. From that pool, the committee brought forward two candidates to the Select Board: Mason, Easthampton's director of Parks And Recreation, and Allison Schmitt, executive director for Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll).

During the Select Board meeting on Tuesday, the board voted, 4-1, to offer the post to Mason, following a meeting that lasted more than two hours.

Prior to the interviews, the board bid farewell to outgoing Town Administrator Gina Dario, who is taking a position as Adams' new Community Development Director. Her last day is Friday, but she will be a resource to Lanesborough to ensure a smooth transition.

Mason brings about 20 years of experience in municipal government, including the last 17 years as director of Parks And Recreation in Easthampton, where his responsibilities included grant writing, managing state and federal grants, overseeing budgets, and managing projects.

Prior to that, he served as executive director of a Boys & Girls Club near Boston, where he developed his grant-writing experience. He credits that role with helping him grow.

"We were trying to run an operation on good feelings and no money. It's tough to operate that way. So it was very challenging, and I had to learn how to grant write and to do it well," he said.

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