Mount Greylock School Committee Discusses Outstanding Questions in Field Debate
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday discussed whether it can make another try at improving playing fields at the middle/high school as soon as this fall.
Carolyn Greene of the panel's Finance Subcommittee reported that the district will know in October the current value of the $5 million capital gift Mount Greylock received from Williams College in 2016.
Over the last five years, that gift has been drawn down for various infrastructure needs at the Cold Spring Road school and what has not been spent has also appreciated in value as part of the college's multibillion-dollar endowment.
Once each year, the college provides an updated figure for how much the district has available from the gift's proceeds. And the Finance Subcommittee suggested that the full committee should decide by the fall whether it wants to pursue an artificial turf multipurpose field and/or a track for the campus in order to put such projects out to bid at the optimal time.
The question of whether the district should make those investments — particularly as regards the synthetic field — has long been a focus of debate on the School Committee and in the broader community, with loud voices speaking out for and against an artificial surface.
On Thursday, Greene asked her colleagues what questions they needed to have answered in order to be able to make a decision about whether to send the project out to bid for a third time — this time without the inclusion of Title IX and Americans with Disabilities Act work that was separated from the project in the spring and is currently underway.
"These are the questions that, perhaps, we hadn't given complete answers to, or community members felt we hadn't fully responded to," Greene said. "Some of them are questions we were still asking ourselves. … Is there anything we're missing, anything we should revise, adjust, edit? And then we'll spend a little time researching: What do we know? What else do we need to figure out?
"By 'we,' I kind of mean the administration, so I want to be mindful that this list can't grow very long. We need to contain the conversations to the highest priority: What we need in order for us to be able to make a decision about whether and how to move forward in October."
The questions compiled by the Finance Subcommittee included "policy" questions like whether the district should fund future maintenance of the turf field through usage fees charged to outside groups as well as thornier issues like "Are there student health concerns [with synthetic turf]?"
Potential health impacts from exposure to artificial surfaces have been raised by critics of the turf field as have questions about negative environmental impacts from artificial turf and whether the district should be sending the message that more plastics are ideal.
Another vein of criticism has concerned whether the district should spend the capital gift on a "want," like a turf field or reserve all of it for future infrastructure needs, like new roofs and boilers.
In December 2020, the School Committee voted 6-0-1 to reserve $1 million from the capital gift for a Mount Greylock "renewal fund." But even that decision raises a new question. "[I]s that $1M as of last year's vote or $1M as of … now?" the Finance Subcommittee's Thursday memo asked, acknowledging that $1 million set aside from the gift on Dec. 22, 2020, the date of the vote, would have appreciated in value proportionate to the overall performance of the investments in the Williams endowment.
That Dec. 22 vote came a week after the School Committee hosted a pair of hourlong public forums designed to allow proponents and opponents of an artificial turf field to make their cases to the committee.
On Thursday, the district's business administrator, who will be responsible for helping compile responses to the questions on the Finance Subcommittee's list, recognized that there are not definitive answers to some of those questions.
"For [‘How would the field itself impact the environment?'], this one is definitely gathering the latest research and putting it in front of us," Joe Bergeron said. "It's a judgment call. Unfortunately, when this topic is brought up in pretty much every community where it's considered, you find hours of debate on the topic. I think the best we could possibly do is serve up the latest studies we can find.
"For ['Are there student health concerns?'], it's the same thing. There is no yes or no."
Superintendent Jason McCandless reminded the School Committee members that whatever they decide on the synthetic turf question, they will not satisfy all their constituents — no matter how much research is compiled.
"The questions we started the evening with did capture the questions out there in the community," McCandless said. "Questions that were either not fully answered or not fully answered to the satisfaction of people approaching this with a well-defined position of desperately wanting the field or not wanting the field at all.
"For the people who like the outcome that the School Committee comes to … they will be of the opinion that there was just the right amount of process or there was way too much process because this is on year four or five of the conversation. For the people who don't like the outcome, they will be firmly convinced forever that there was no process at all. I think that's just human nature. Like every process I've ever been a part of, that's a piece of where you end up."
Tags: endowment, MGRHS, playing fields, turf field,
