Social Media Attacks Take Toll on Mount Greylock Public Servant
Mount Greylock School Committee member Wendy Penner has expressed an interest in taking Carolyn Greene's place on the RDAC.
Carolyn Greene told her colleagues on the School Committee at its monthly meeting that she hopes School Committee member Wendy Penner will be able to fill in for her on the Regional District Amendment Committee, which Greene chaired in 2013 when the school launched its initial study and earlier this year when the School Committee brought the issue back to the fore.
The RDAC is the group charged with developing a proposal to expand the junior-senior high school district to include its two feeder schools, Lanesborough Elementary School and Williamstown Elementary School. The district has asked both its member towns to schedule special town meetings in November to decide the question.
On Tuesday, Greene said the RDAC has received nearly 70 responses to a survey it developed seeking community input on the question.
She also indicated that she had become the focus of vitriol.
"Some of the commentary on social media has gotten not nice," Greene said. "I guess that's what happens. That's what we see happen on issues nationally.
"What I need to do is step back from this process. I think I said a while ago I'm probably not the best person to lead this charge. I've done it before. I've done the building committee."
Greene said she shared her decision with School Committee Chairwoman Sheila Hebert, who was absent from Tuesday's meeting. Greene, the School Committee's vice chairwoman, led the monthly meeting in Hebert's absence — ironic given that one of the attacks on Greene in the comment section of a previous iBerkshires.com article centered on a conspiracy theory that Greene was usurping Hebert's authority.
School Committee member Al Terranova said it is "very unfortunate" that the discourse on social media lacks civility and sometimes indicates an unwillingness to accept or even acknowledge direct answers to questions that are asked.
"Contention is fine on topics," Greene said. "But when it becomes personal, it's something altogether different.
"That was the idea of the [Mount Greylock Regional District Amendment Committee] Facebook page, to provide another opportunity for discussion and transparency. I hope that can continue — respectfully."
The School Committee on Tuesday grappled with questions about the breadth and depth of study for the current RDAC. The first amendment committee spent a year looking at the question of full regionalization and ultimately recommended going forward with the expansion; the School Committee put that idea on hold in 2013 when the district was invited into the Massachusetts School Building Authority's process after a 10-year effort to secure state funding to address deficiencies in the facility.
Chris Dodig, who serves on the RDAC working group addressing the language of a proposed district amendment, talked about the suggestion coming from Williamstown that the expanded region include "alternative funding" options that would allow one town to add funding for its elementary school on top of the district budget for K-6 education.
"We're able to write in that language easily enough," Dodig said. "We just need to know what language we want to take to the towns.
"The biggest problem with alternative funding, in my judgment, is that each year it has to to be approved by each town at town meeting. Even if we put it in, the towns have to vote for it each year after that. If you look down the road, it seems like a recipe for trouble."
Some Williamstown officials have suggested that alternative funding would be a way to maintain local control over the elementary schools. But potential fairness issues have been acknowledged publicly by the current chairman of the Williamstown Elementary School Committee.
Dodig raised the same issue.
"It would be hard for me as a voter to say: I'm going to approve a budget that gives less to my child's school than someone else's," Dodig said. "We have to think really carefully about that before we go down that road."
A different kind of "alternative" study also has been requested of the district. The Williamstown Board of Selectmen has asked the district to study various scenarios, including full regionalization, operating each of the three schools as fully separate entities without shared services, and continuing the current shared services model under the Tri-District umbrella, where Mount Greylock, LES and WES share a superintendent, assistant superintendent, business manager and special education director.
Dodig balked at the idea of devoting School Committee and RDAC resources to that analysis.
"It's kind of an odd concept to ask a subcommittee of Mount Greylock to look at what it would cost if Williamstown Elementary was separate," Dodig said. "I'm not sure if that's our job."
Steven Miller, who is not a member of RDAC but helps the subcommittee's finance working group, countered that analysis is appropriate for the district and argued that creating different models is not time-consuming once the data is collected.
"I think it does fall within the realm of the task force to look at all the alternatives," Miller said.
Penner emphasized the narrow time frame for the regionalization effort and suggested that the elementary school committees in Williamstown and Lanesborough need to decide whether they want to get behind the effort.
"My feeling is unless we have members of the elementary school committees willing to be at the forefront in this conversation … and be champions of it, it's going to be difficult to imagine a successful vote," Penner said.
The RDAC, formed earlier this year by the Mount Greylock School Committee, includes representatives from the Lanesborough and Williamstown Elementary School Committees and each community's town hall.
Advocates of regionalization know there are hurdles in their path.
The three school districts already enjoy the financial benefit of shared services, and the inefficiency of the current Tri-District arrangement — while obvious to those involved in the day to day — is not apparent to outsiders.
"People don't put a lot of value, somehow, into the discussion of the burdensome administrative structure," Greene said. "People say, 'Are you just trying to cut down on paperwork?' Paperwork? You're talking about mandated reporting to the state.
"It always comes down to, 'You're doing it. Why can't you keep doing it?' That's the part that's really hard to quantify and qualify."
Interim Superintendent Kimberley Grady said Tuesday that the administrative demands of managing three districts takes away from the time the person in her position should be devoting to working with principals and students. And the extended nights and weekends required may be OK for a potential superintendent who has no family or life outside of the job, but those candidates are hard to come by.
"Everything we do, we have to do by three because of the nature of this," Grady said. "And anything we do requires three meetings."
Penner reminded her colleagues that is why they signed up Grady, the district's nominal assistant superintendent, as interim superintendent through the 2017-18 academic year.
"When we did our last superintendent search, our preference was to bring an experienced superintendent here, and we couldn't do that because of the pool we got," Penner said. "We have to be realistic about what our chances are to attract an experienced superintendent.
"That's critical to the success of our region if we're going to continue as a Tri-District. We have to continue to address the onerous demands we place on the superintendent."
It remains to be seen whether the "unsustainability" of the current model is a persuasive argument for full regionalization.
"I have talked to people who have expressed an understanding of the stress of the administration … but they put a higher priority on the loss of local control," Miller said. "That's why I think it's important we have several options that can be studied by RDAC."
Greene pointed out, not for the first time, that one of the options would be for Mount Greylock to step back from the shared services arrangement.
"There's a point at which the Mount Greylock School Committee needs to say if [full regionalization] doesn't happen, does it make sense for us to just be Greylock?" Greene said. "We know what we need for the school and the new building. This is a huge undertaking."
Tags: MGRHS, regionalization,
