WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Despite assailing his committee chair on a number of fronts, Richard Cohen was quick to support her for a lifetime achievement award on Monday evening.

 

It was that kind of night for the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee.

 

The committee held its final formal meeting before taking its usual summer hiatus, and it had several items to wrap up, including its annual evaluation of the district's superintendent, a process which drew sharp criticism from Cohen.

 

But moments before that discussion got under way, committee member Wendy Penner moved that the panel nominate Carolyn Greene for the Massachusetts Association of School Committee's Lifetime Achievement award.

 

Cohen immediately seconded the motion, noting Greene's leadership on the formation of the Williamstown-Lanesborough Tri-District and Mount Greylock's building project — both, he said, "solidifying that the relationship between Williamstown and Lanesborough is something that will last for 50 or 100 years."

 

It was a moment that acknowledged how much the committee has accomplished under Greene's leadership at a time when Cohen continues to raise concerns about recent moves.

 

Last month, he filed an Open Meeting Law violation complaint against Greene, the chairs of the Williamstown and Lanesborough elementary school committees and Superintendent Douglas Dias. And on Monday, in addition to criticizing Greene's handling of the superintendent review process, he raised issues about a subcommittee appointment from five months ago and the relocation of the Tri-District central offices during the coming renovation/addition project at the junior-senior high school.

 

The first issue involved the Administrative Review Subcommittee, a four-person body that includes members of all three school committees in the Tri-District. Traditionally, that has included the chairs of the two elementary school committees and the chair and vice chair of the Mount Greylock School Committee.

 

However, the vice chairwoman at Mount Greylock, Sheila Hebert, currently serves on the three-person Lanesborough Elementary School Committee. Therefore, her service on the ARS would create a "quorum problem" for the Lanesborough committee. With that in mind, Greene named Chris Dodig, another Lanesborough resident on the Mount Greylock committee, to serve on ARS.

 

The committee discussed Dodig's appointment at its Jan. 19 meeting and nearly voted to make the switch. It ultimately decided not to hold such a vote because no vote was listed on the posted agenda, but Greene told her colleagues she would simply make the appointment in her capacity as chair.

 

Cohen said he recently found that Dodig served in his capacity as ARS member at the subcommittee's Jan. 8 meeting.

 

"The issue is he was appointed on the 19th, and we were given the impression he was newly appointed, and he was already serving on the 8th," Cohen said.

 

Greene said there was no ill intent in the move, but from a timing standpoint, ARS needed to meet, and since the body requires all four members for a quorum, the second Mount Greylock seat needed to be filled.

 

"Let me clarify that the chair appoints members of the subcommittee," Greene said. "I brought it to the full committee because I would have liked to have the support of the whole committee to appoint Chris to serve in Sheila's stead."

 

Penner said it was a "no harm, no foul" situation.

 

"I'm sorry people find it difficult, but I'm not bothered by it," she said. "I'm having trouble understanding what harm was done."

 

"It wasn't that harm was done," Cohen replied. "It's clear from the tape [of the Jan. 19 meeting] that his appointment was a new thing. If this was a retroactive appointment, I wouldn't have a problem with that. We need to be more candid in our communication."

 

"It has nothing to do with being candid, Rich," Greene responded.

 

The committee took no action on the issue, other than to ask that the district's website be kept up-to-date to reflect subcommittee appointments. As of Thursday morning, it continued to list Hebert as a member of the Administrative Review Subcommittee.

 

The committee did need to take action on the question of where to locate the superintendent and his staff during the upcoming building project. The Tri-District offices have been located in an area of Mount Greylock that will be gutted in Phase 1 of the project.

 

Ultimately, the Tri-District offices will need a new home. The Massachusetts School Building Authority does not compensate space built for central administration as part of its building projects, and no office space for Tri-District staff is planned in the new Mount Greylock.

 

For months, Cohen has questioned the decision-making process that has Dias and his staff temporarily moving to vacant space in the existing junior-senior high school.

 

This spring, the Lanesborough Board of Selectmen wrote the district offering to rent it space at Lanesborough Elementary School. And the School Committee considered that letter on Monday night.

 

Cohen noted that the idea of repurposing what some in the community have characterized as "empty classrooms" at Lanesborough has been discussed for a year in the town.

 

"This is why I've been trying for three months to bring up this discussion in the Building Committee and in here," Cohen said. "I think it may have been worth considering whether for a year or two we could have used some space in Lanesborough as a gesture. It's too late now."

 

Greene pointed out that it's not too late to have a discussion about the new permanent home for the Tri-District offices, and Dias agreed that it is worth continuing the conversation with Lanesborough to see what might be arranged.

 

In other business on Monday, the School Committee gave district Business Manager Nancy Rauscher authorization to make line item transfers to balance out the fiscal year 2016 books over the summer, approved Mount Greylock's 2016-17 School Improvement Plan as presented by Principal Mary MacDonald, discussed plans for a planned Aug. 13 summer retreat for all three Tri-District school committees and took two steps to keep the school building project on track.

 

In a 5-0-1 vote (with Greene abstaining), the School Committee voted to authorize Greene and Dias to sign a contract with Turner Construction, the construction manager selected by the district late last year.

 

Turner already has been doing pre-construction work for the district on a smaller work order while the parties worked out the details of a voluminous contract that will control the $64.8 million project. Greene had hoped to have a final contract ready for the committee's review on Monday, but the district's counsel was still ironing out the final details.

 

The School Committee also voted to give Greene and Dias the authority to sign a builder's risk insurance policy for the district.

 

Rauscher explained that the district had a quote of just under $89,000 for a policy from Worcester's Hanover Insurance Group. Rauscher said the district received three quotes through its broker; two, including Hanover's, were under the $120,000 line item in the school building project budget.

 

Committee members arriving for Monday's meeting saw the first obvious signs of the coming construction project: the removal of ceiling tiles in the corridors of areas included in Phase 1 and ribbons tied around trees on the school grounds indicating which will be kept, moved or cut down as part of the process.