WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee on Thursday agreed to rely more heavily on school choice revenue and eliminate one planned position from its fiscal 2023 spending plan in order to gain support of Lanesborough town officials.

 

Superintendent Jake McCandless and Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance Joe Bergeron presented an updated budget plan that directs $75,000 more in school choice funds and trims the Lanesborough Elementary School operating budget by $19,506 in order to drop Lanesborough's assessment after feedback from town officials.

 

The spending plan the School Committee passed last month included a $6,128,751 assessment to Lanesborough, which represented a 4.29 percent increase from its FY22 assessment.

 

The budget as revoted on Thursday drops that assessment to $6,034,245, a 2.58 percent increase for the town.

 

"The School Committee [last month] did what your job is to do, which is to advocate for the budget you believe best serves the kids that the communities elect you to go to bat for," McCandless said. "Finance committees and select boards have different jobs and different missions than school committees. They're responsible for making everything in the town work, and oftentimes there are competing interests.

 

"Tonight, we're presenting you with a slightly reworked budget to get a number we hope will get the endorsement of the Lanesborough Finance Committee, select board and ultimately town meeting."

 

Members of both the Fin Comm and Board of Selectmen in Lanesborough told McCandless and Bergeron that the original requested increase was more than the town's taxpayers could handle, particularly given other pressing needs on the town budget.

 

"We had an excellent give and take with the Lanesborough Select Board and Finance Committee," McCandless said. "Their response was, really, unanimous: We get it, we understand it, we trust you all, we're grateful for the work you do, and we know the work you do is real, but the percentage we were bringing forward to them was simply not something they could support with the other things they're working to balance."

 

Thursday's revised budget includes no changes to the budget at Williamstown Elementary School or in the assessment to Williamstown for the PreK-12 district. A presentation by the district last week to the Williamstown Fin Comm garnered no similar requests for a reduction in the town's assessment. The interim town manager has prepared a townwide budget (including school costs), approved by the Fin Comm on Wednesday, that stays within the bounds of Proposition 2 1/2, which limits levy increases, year-to-year, to 2.5 percent.

 

The original budget passed by the School Committee in March saw the district drawing down on the reserves it has accumulated from its School Choice revenue, and the new budget continues that drawdown but does not exacerbate it because it includes a plan to add at least 15 more school choice seats at Lanesborough Elementary.

 

By state law, districts receive $5,000 per student they accept from outside the district under the school choice program. Fifteen new choice students would equate to $75,000, equal to the additional reserve funds utilized in the revised budget.

 

McCandless said it is appropriate for the district to consider adding school choice seats in all three of its schools after two years with little to no new school choice opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

"We have gone to all three schools and sat with all three principals, although tonight we're really focusing on Lanesborough," McCandless said. "After two years of not really opening up new School Choice slots … primarily because we have not known for two years from year to year what our school year was going to look like, and we wanted to make sure our energies were focused exclusively on the people that we were already serving and not further complicate anyone else's lives by bringing in new students.

 

"We haven't really taken anyone in two years. We're venturing a return to using school choice for what it was for, which is not to open up new classrooms, not to add to costs, but to take pre-existing sections and fill up a few more seats in those sections where it's developmentally appropriate and academically appropriate."

 

School Committee members asked McCandless whether he expected the 15 new slots at Lanesborough would be filled. He said that based on his experience in two years in the district, and knowledge of its waitlist for school choice slots and his experience as a longtime superintendent in neighboring Pittsfield, he was confident a high percentage of the seats would be filled.

 

He also said that at next week's regular monthly meeting, the School Committee would be presented with a school choice proposal that will include not only the new seats at Lanesborough Elementary but likely also more seats at Williamstown Elementary and Mount Greylock Regional School.

 

In addition to the projected increase revenue to the school choice "revolver" account, the new budget also trims costs at Lanesborough Elementary by reducing a paraprofessional position in the original budget. McCandless told the School Committee that the change can be made without anyone losing their job and without impacting classroom coverage.

 

"Across the district, we had paraprofessional positions we were unable to fill this year, so they were literally open the entire school year," McCandless said. "One of the beauties of being a three-school district is, even if we reduce in one place, we might have openings at another."

 

Although no one in either town government pushed the district to abandon plans for a much discussed new director of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging position, School Committee member Steven Miller made a motion at Thursday's meeting that the district take the position out of the FY23 budget until it finds out later this year the status of its excess and deficiency budget and whether the $100,000 expenditure could come from E&D.

 

The motion died on the floor without a second. Miller ended up voting in the minority of a 6-1 vote to pass the budget as amended.

 

In presenting the revised budget with the lower assessment to one of the district's two member towns, Bergeron cautioned that steeper assessments may be inevitable in the future.

 

"We can defer a sizable percentage increase," he said. "That is not an infinite ability, and we need to make sure when we look at FY24, FY25, we come to grips with where costs are increasing, ways we can and cannot cut expenditures without cutting into what we're trying to provide.

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"We feel like with the two levers we pulled, we will hopefully get their support."

 

In other business on Thursday, the School Committee authorized an expenditure of up to $275,000 to replace 20-year-old condenser units at Williamstown Elementary School. The funds will come from a building endowment established with a gift from Williams College when the school opened at the turn of the century.

 

"Currently, in the gift to WES, there is $2.5 million, which sounds like a good amount of money until you realize the building is also coming up on needing flooring, a roof and windows over the next few years," Bergeron told the School Commitee's Finance subcommittee, which met prior to Thursday's full committee meeting.