WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday voted unanimously to allocate the rest of the town's American Rescue Plan Act funds toward a Mount Greylock Regional School District initiative to address bias-based incidents in the public schools.

 

On a vote of 4-0, with Jeffrey Johnson absent, the board agreed to contribute about $66,000 — what remains uncommitted from the town's original ARPA grant of about $2 million — as requested by the Mount Greylock School Committee.

 

Interim Superintendent Joseph Bergeron and School Committee Vice Chair Carolyn Greene, a Williamstown resident, attended the meeting at Town Hall to provide more details about a proposal that has developed from conversations of a group of district parents and caregivers and the administration.

 

"What you have before you is a proposal for highly structured work that we would like to bring a third party in to conduct to help do a review, recommend improvement for and see the School Committee to the point where we can have an action plan developed by the administration for improvement of the ways that the school district handles bias-based incidents, bullying incidents, Title IX-related incidents," Bergeron said.

 

"These are all areas of work within school districts that, one, are evolving very quickly and, two, are areas where larger school districts and school districts that have had dedicated staff in this kind of work for many years generally have more experience both in terms of volume of cases but also in terms of best practices and vision into the best ways to help our students and staff navigate difficult situations."

 

Bergeron said that, with the commitment from the Williamstown Select Board, the district would form an advisory committee including members of the parents group, district staff and School Committee members to develop a request for proposals to put out to consultants versed in this sort of work.

 

He said the RFP hopefully would be issued by the end of the summer, proposals could be returned in early fall and the work could begin in late fall or winter with the goal of presenting a report to the public in spring 2025.

 

In addition to the core work of reviewing the district's policies and procedures and recommending changes to its response to bias incidents, Bergeron laid out a number of other areas where Mount Greylock would like to receive guidance from a consultant if the budget allows.

 

"In addition to that work, there are some other areas, including how to best measure the progress we make as a school district around equity and belonging with our students, with our staff, with our community," he said. "And there are additional 'wonderful-to-haves' based on where proposals come back and costs lie, around how we communicate with our community, the types of communication, the moments of communication, the content of those communications. … Reviewing how we go about hiring and retaining our employees. 

 

"Finally, restorative practices. That's a phrase people often bat around, but the general idea is that when there is conflict or there are questions, the ways in which you bring parties together to restore relationships, to be able to move forward in ways that are productive, as opposed to punitive. Those types of practices are areas where we have been investing … but we really need to accelerate how we go about that, hopefully, again, input from a third party would help us understand our path and ways to improve it."

 

In answer to a question from the board, Bergeron said the anticipated cost of the consultant work would be in the "$80,000 to $100,000 type range."

 

He said some of that would depend on how the RFP is written and the extent to which the district asks consultants to spend time analyzing its current procedures as opposed to simply recommending best practices.

 

Bergeron said a $66,000 grant of ARPA funds from the town would be a boost to the district and that he would work on finding other sources to close the funding gap, if there was one, including, perhaps, reallocating funds budgeted for professional development and seeking private grant sources.

 

Board member Andrew Hogeland asked Bergeron whether Mount Greylock's other member town, Lanesborough, had been approached to help fund the initiative.

 

Bergeron explained that the district is treating the request for ARPA funds as a grant from the town of Williamstown, which would not require the expense to be allocated between the member towns, as expenses typically are under the terms of Mount Greylock's Regional Agreement.

 

"I know there are people in Lanesborough who would love to see this work come through," Bergeron said. "I think there are some ways to figure out how funding might be developed from the town of Lanesborough. But I can't speak at all for town hall itself or where, within its budget committee structure that might happen."

 

Hogeland said he would feel more comfortable if both member towns had a stake in the process.

 

"I'd like the question to be asked," he said. "It's this odd thing where it's a two-town school district. I don't want to have us fund the entire thing. I'd rather match that with whatever the school district has and whatever Lanesborough or private donors, institutions or private citizens may have.

 

"The work's got to be done. No doubt about that. I want to make sure we're not the sole funder of all this."

 

"Understood," Bergeron replied.