Lanesborough's School Study Panel Sets Timeline
 The committee met for the first time on Tuesday. |
The committee met for the first time on Tuesday. The group is being asked by the Board of Selectmen to weigh the pros and cons of various superintendency options.
Currently, the Elementary School shares administrative staff with Mount Greylock Regional School and Williamstown Elementary School.
"They would love to have a unified set of proposals that is a win-win-win all around but that may not be possible. There may be a menu of options," said Town Administrator Paul Sieloff, who served as the chairman of the first meeting. "The board is looking for a cooperative effort to give some guidance."
An array of school issues are coming together at once. Mount Greylock is concluding a regionalization study and is expected to ask town meeting to approve creating one district for all three schools. A new building project also is being proposed for Mount Greylock. And the current superintendent is retiring.
School Committee member Robert Barton has been advocating for the town to dissolve the superintendency agreement with Williamstown Elementary. That would also affect the administration-sharing agreement with the regional school district. He says the town has been underserved by the current agreement and joining with another district could be more beneficial.
The School Committee ultimately did not vote on that and instead promised to study it. When that didn't happen, Barton and School Committee member Jim Moriarty planned a vote to dissolve the agreement to force the study.
Two days earlier, however, the Selectmen formed this ad hoc committee of nine individuals, and that was enough for the two members to again delay the vote.
The members are Barton, Regina DiLego (current chairman of the School Committee), Carole Castonguay, Jack Hickey, Christine Canning-Wilson, Shari Peltier, Richard Cohen, Ronald Tinkham and Jennifer DeChaine. Some of them have already been publicly vocal about their preferences to either stay with the agreement or dissolve it and most have professional experience in schools.
"I got the impression from the [Selectmen] that if I was to report back to them that there was fighting going on, they'd say let's not do it," Sieloff, as a shot across the bow, told the committee members. "We need to use respect, the concept of cooperation, of trying to accomplish a goal."
The committee is being asked to recommend a course of action to the Board of Selectmen from a range of alternatives. But with the other school issues coming to a head, the timeline is tight. The committee is planning to meet at least once a week — on Thursday nights — to complete its research. Next week, it is meeting on both Tuesday and Thursday.
Castonguay said she would take the role of chair of those two. The committee will then rotate the role so that everybody can be fully involved equally in the work.
The committee is preparing to perform the research on its own but left the options open for hiring a facilitator to keep the process moving. There is a few thousand dollars still aside in the budget for these types of studies, Sieloff said.
Tinkham suggested dipping into those funds to hire former interim Town Administrator Joseph Kellogg.
"He's very unbiased. He was generally well-liked," Sieloff said.
However, the committee felt they had the expertise to do it on their own — at least for the time being.
"We should do it as a committee. If we get bogged down then we could consider a facilitator but I'd like for us to do it ourselves," Castonguay said.
Another decision made Tuesday was to research how to share information without violating Open Meeting Law. DiLego and Barton together make a quorum of the School Committee.
Additionally, others said they didn't want to be overloaded by the amount of back and forth banter between meetings among the nine members.
Ultimately, they agreed to use a Google Docs account for people to place items of information for everyone to read at their leisure but agreed not to alter, discuss or edit between meetings.
"We have to be very careful with the open meeting law. There is a very fine line with sharing information and obtaining support for an item. That's a very difficult line. It is very shady," Tinkham said.
Barton suggested information overload could be avoided by divvying up the work into smaller groups.
Cohen added that the committee shouldn't talk about the work they are doing until the end as well — citing a column submitted to iBerkshires a few days earlier on the topic from Barton. The committee agreed.
Members also agreed that the overall idea is to determine the pros and cons of the governance structure of the schools. They kicked around ways to measure that including cost, the amount of power they have with decisions, the educational attainment, compliance with state laws, transition costs and if the plan is feasible.
With one meeting to get their feet wet completed, committee members are staring down a fast-paced two months through the holiday season to complete the study.
Tags: LES, study committee, SU71,
