Letter: Bilal for Williamstown Select Board

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To the Editor:

I am writing to urge Williamstown voters to elect Bilal Ansari to the Williamstown Select Board on Tuesday, May 10. Dr. Ansari has dedicated himself to a life of service, to helping people resolve difficult situations. He listens intently and responds carefully with compassion. He appeals to our best nature. These are essential skills needed at this moment in our town.

Dr. Ansari does not believe that he alone has the solutions to all of the challenges facing our town. Instead, he wants to hear from those comfortable speaking up and also those who, until now, have not felt comfortable nor heard at all. He believes it will take a village to share concerns and work together to make Williamstown a better place for everyone to live and work and grow. But making that happen takes a special type of skilled leadership.

Bilal Ansari is the candidate blessed with that skilled leadership and a stake in our town's quality of life. He has deep roots in this town: his ancestors lived and worked here. He is committed to an approach based in kindness and inclusion. He is the candidate who can and will help us reach a new, inclusive and more equitable chapter in our town's history.

I ask for your vote on May 10 for Bilal Ansari for the Williamstown Select Board. Thank you.

 

Hugh L Guilderson, Ph.D.
Williamstown, Mass.

 

 

 


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Mount Greylock Schools Draft Budget Sees Double-Digit Percentage Hikes for Towns

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday began consideration of whether it wants to send its member towns fiscal year 2027 assessments that are 12 to 13 percent higher than the bills Lanesborough and Williamstown paid for the current school year.
 
The committee held a special meeting with a single item on the agenda: the draft FY27 budget prepared by the administration.
 
That spending plan, which comes with no net increase in staffing or services, would result in an 11.73 percent increase in the assessment to Lanesborough (up by $801,742 from FY26) and a 12.71 percent increase to Williamstown (up by $1,883,944).
 
The draft budget could address some of the needs expressed by the school councils in each of the district's three schools. But it does so by reallocating positions in the FY26 budget and without adding any full-time equivalent positions (FTEs), Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the School Committee.
 
Both Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary listed the addition of a math interventionist as one of their top priorities for FY27 in presentations given to the School Committee over the last couple of months.
 
"Both elementary schools have potential paths to gaining math interventionists," Bergeron said. "The increases that you see within what we have here, meaning the 12 and 13 percent increases, those embed with them the ability to gain those math interventionists within the staffing. In order to do that, we would need to move pieces around within schools.
 
"If we wanted to … purely increase FTEs in order to achieve math interventionists at the elementary schools coming in from the outside? Each town's budget would need to increase by about another $100,000, and that equates to increasing each town's percentage [increase] by another .4 to .5 percent."
 
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