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From left, Lanesborough School Committee Chairwoman Regina DiLego, Tri-District interim Superintendent Kimberley Grady, Williamstown School Committee Chairman Joe Bergeron and Mount Greylock School Committee Chairwoman Sheila Hebert.

Mount Greylock Lets Elementary Schools, Towns Drive Regionalization Talk

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday reaffirmed its support for an affirmative vote to fully regionalize but urged its partners at Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary schools to take the lead in the runup to a planned November vote in each town.
 
The junior-senior high school district has been studying the possibility of inviting the two "feeder" elementaries into the regional district since 2013, when Mount Greylock conducted a yearlong study through its Regional District Amendment Committee.
 
After shelving the regionalization question to focus on a school building project, the Mount Greylock School Committee revived the RDAC earlier this year.
 
On Tuesday, committee members acknowledged that the questions they have received about regionalization stem from fears of losing local control over the elementary schools. If the process is to succeed, the committees in each town that currently govern the elementary school districts need to take a more active role.
 
School Committee member Carolyn Green, who recently stepped down from the RDAC, led off the conversation by citing the feedback from the subcommittee's survey.
 
"We had just under 100 responses to the survey," Greene said. "We heard questions like: 'What's driving this?' 'Can we fix the current system?' 'What are the educational benefits?' 'What can we do as a region that we're not doing now?' … and a lot of questions about 'What's in it for me?' in the sense of what's in it for the elementary school in Williamstown and what's in it for the elementary school in Lanesborough."
 
Greene said that she has a sense that there are unresolved tensions between the two towns since the vote on the building project, and it is not the right time for Mount Greylock to lead the conversation about solidifying the educational partnership between the two communities.
 
"It's also become apparent that this isn't really a Mount Greylock issue," she said. "It's a town issue and an elementary school issue. Greylock is already a region. We know how to be a region, and we know what that entails. But there are a lot of concerns from the towns and elementary schools and town officials about what that would look like."
 
The Mount Greylock School Committee met jointly Tuesday with the committee from Superintendency Union 71, a partnership of the elementary school committees. Together, Mount Greylock and SU71 share the services of a superintendent, assistant superintendent, director of pupil personnel services and business manager.
 
It is those synergies and the educational benefits that accrue that advocates of regionalization hope to sustain by fully regionalizing.
 
Williamstown School Committee Chairman Joe Bergeron, the only member of his committee present for the SU71 meeting, said part of the response to people on the fence about regionalization should be that the three separate districts already function as a district in some respects but not not in other ways that can make the partnership more sustainable.
 
"All the members of all three or four school committees ... we know the details of our arrangement. We live that every day. I don't think your typical people in town understand the degree to which we're already intertwined.
 
"We already share numerous positions. We already have numerous agreements between the two schools in ways that function but that are cumbersome and complicated."
 
Bergeron and Lanesborough School Committee Chairwoman Regina DiLego both said their committees were deferring to Mount Greylock to take the lead on the regionalization effort.
 
Bergeron has served on the RDAC's working group looking at the financial impact of regionalization and promised to take up the question of elementary school leadership when his committee holds its regular monthly meeting on Wednesday.
 
Members of the Mount Greylock School Committee did not mince any words when discussing the challenges facing the regionalization effort.
 
Greene pointed to a political climate with "a fair amount of hostility and tension" between town officials and cited the backdrop of the recent strife in the Adams-Cheshire Regional School District.
 
"We already put in our [proposed] agreement safeguards … but the concern is there that there will be a town-town divide," Greene said.
 
The proposed regional agreement drafted by the Mount Greylock RDAC in 2013 would require an affirmative vote in both member towns to close either of the elementary schools.
 
Individual Mount Greylock School Committee members expressed frustrations with town officials in both Williamstown and Lanesborough — the latter over perceptions, the former over their recent comments about regionalization.
 
"I'm a Lanesborough resident, and Lanesborough residents are really pro education," committee member Al Terranova said. "If Lanesborough officials have the reputation of being against education, we should ask them directly … have them write a letter or take a vote.
 
"I'm for regionalization. I know there are problems, but we can work it out. To have three or four people speak for 3,000 people is an unfair assessment of the town I live in."
 
Fellow committee member Chris Dodig, also a resident of Lanesborough, again pointed to a recent request from the Williamstown Board of Selectmen that the RDAC report on a variety of financial scenarios, including one in which all three districts go their separate ways.
 
"I don't believe that's Mount Greylock's job," Dodig said. "If Williamstown Elementary School or the town wishes to do that analysis, they should. But I don't think we should give credibility to the idea that they should move backward or go separately. If the town officials believe that, they should have the courage to say so.
 
"My sense is some leaders in Williamstown are just against regionalization because they want the ability to give more to the WES students than they give to the Lanesborough students under any circumstances."
 
Dodig bristled at the notion that Williamstown supports its school any better than Lanesborough supports its school in any event.
 
"This year, it was WES that had trouble meeting its recommended budget amount from the Town of Williamstown," he said, referring to the winter-spring FY18 budget discussions. "For the second time in recent memory this year, the Lanesborough town voters stepped up and gave more money to the elementary school than it asked for.
 
"Lanesborough voters, as Carrie has said, have demonstrated a deep commitment to education."
 
Mount Greylock Chairwoman Sheila Hebert, of Lanesborough as well, agreed.
 
"When parents are looking to move to a town for their children — I know for us, we moved to Lanesborough because of the school system," she said. "We didn't look at the politics or what the selectmen were saying.
 
"Lanesborough [Elementary] is an excellent school, and that's why people are moving to Lanesborough."
 
Williamstown Finance Committee member Paula Consolini, who serves on the RDAC, told the school committees that Dodig identified a key problem facing the regionalization effort: tribalism. Consolini pointed to national news reports about school districts around the country that are breaking up into smaller, single-school districts.
 
Consolini, who also co-chairs Mount Greylock's School Building Committee, said the argument for regionalization is an even harder case to make to voters.
 
"This is harder because the building project was concrete," she said. "From an engineering standpoint, we could say X, Y and Z."
 
The arguments for regionalization — like educational benefits and efficiency — are less tangible, Consolini said.
 
Lanesborough's DiLego said the three school districts made a tactical error when they created the current Tri-District arrangement. While school officials may have foreseen it as a way of moving toward full regionalization, they did not make that goal more explicit at the time.
 
"Joe [Bergeron] is right," DiLego said. "We do function as a region. Even our school choice decisions [at the elementary school] are made with an eye toward Williamstown's school choice decisions so we don't create classes that are too large going to Mount Greylock. If we weren't thinking regionally, we'd make those as isolated decisions like we did nine years ago.
 
"One of the things they say in the [Berkshire County Education Task Force] is the crucial thing would be to put dates on its objectives. When we formed the shared services agreement, that was our mistake. We didn't say the goal was: By this date, we will be fully regionalized. We never put an end date on it."
 
Now there is a deadline of sorts facing school officials. Mount Greylock this spring asked town officials in Lanesborough and Williamstown to hold special town meetings in the fall, and the towns agreed to a Nov. 14 date in both communities to consider the regionalization question.
 
And while the Mount Greylock School Committee stands behind that request, as of Tuesday it is going to let the elementary schools drive the conversation.
 
"It's important that there be a voice of leadership from the elementary school committees of selling this to the communities," Mount Greylock School Committee member Wendy Penner said. "Without that, it's doomed."

Tags: MGRHS,   regionalization,   

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Mount Greylock School Committee Votes Slight Increase to Proposed Assessments

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to slightly increase the assessment to the district's member towns from the figures in the draft budget presented by the administration.
 
The School Committee opted to lower the use of Mount Greylock's reserve account by $70,000 and, instead, increase by that amount the share of the fiscal year 2025 operating budget shared proportionally by Lanesborough and Williamstown taxpayers.
 
The budget prepared by the administration and presented to the School Committee at its annual public hearing on Thursday included $665,000 from the district's Excess and Deficiency account, the equivalent of a municipal free cash balance, an accrual of lower-than-anticipated expenses and higher-than-anticipated revenue in any given year.
 
That represented a 90 percent jump from the $350,000 allocated from E&D for fiscal year 2024, which ends on June 30. And, coupled with more robust use of the district's tuition revenue account (7 percent more in FY25) and School Choice revenue (3 percent more), the draw down on E&D is seen as a stopgap measure to mitigate a spike in FY25 expenses and an unsustainable budgeting strategy long term, administrators say.
 
The budget passed by the School Committee on Thursday continues to rely more heavily on reserves than in years past, but to a lesser extent than originally proposed.
 
Specifically, the budget the panel approved includes a total assessment to Williamstown of $13,775,336 (including capital and operating costs) and a total assessment to Lanesborough of $6,425,373.
 
As a percentage increase from the FY24 assessments, that translates to a 3.90 percent increase to Williamstown and a 3.38 percent increase to Lanesborough.
 
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