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Guest Column: Lanesborough Should Look to New School Partners
By Robert Barton, Guest Column
05:35PM / Monday, November 03, 2014
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At the Wednesday (Oct. 29) meeting of Lanesborough's Elementary School Committee there was heated discussion about changing the way the school purchases superintendency and related administrative services. A vote on this was tabled because two days earlier, the town's Board of Selectmen appointed a new committee to study and report back quickly on the town's broader school organization options.

I am a member of the Lanesborough School Committee and a longtime advocate for early-childhood education. Based on years of close observation, I believe that to sustain excellent education for our children that is affordable for the town, Lanesborough must move away from its two-town districts with Williamstown.

I personally favor multitown arrangements in which no single town can dominate the agenda and the decisions. If the multitown operation spreads overhead and saves Lanesborough budget, so much the better.

My non-parenting focus on education goes back more than 20 years to a regionalization study committee at Mount Greylock RHS. More recently I dropped off Lanesborough's Board of Selectmen to join the elementary school committee. I did this mainly because I believe early childhood years are critical to a child's development and educational success, and I didn't like what I was observing at LES. Our superintendent and school committee had forced a toddler's play group out of the school and three months later, after years of undermining the decades-old pre-K program, they eliminated it as well, claiming budgetary issues. As a selectman, I immediately got approval for the play group to shift to the Community Room in Town Hall, where it continues to this day. I then changed seats to the School Committee to tackle the pre-K issue and to identify other ways to cost-effectively improve the school's excellence.

In my first year on that committee, we approved re-opening the pre-K program, in exactly the same format as had been advocated a year earlier by the town's Early Childhood Committee, a group which I had initiated. We also began a more intense struggle with the Williamstown school committees to get the superintendent's office to focus administrative attention on Lanesborough.

Frankly we lost the struggle. We rarely saw the superintendent at school and frequently couldn't get her to meet. A lowlight came with a January 2014 memo from MGRHS chair Carrie Greene, aired on television, demanding that I/we stop asking for so much time from district staff.

This demand ignored a backlog of predictable LES priorities: negotiations of new contracts with teachers and paras, negotiation of a new contract for busing, planning for the relaunch of the pre-kindergarten, implementation of the new state-mandated teacher evaluation system, evaluation of the high school's regionalization plan and other organizational options, and dealing with the end/renewal of contracts with several Tri-district staff (including superintendent). Most problematic, it ignored startling budget/financial surprises — mistakes had thrown our budget out of balance year-after-year by more than $100,000; we had wasted $350,000 in recent years on non-existent and unnecessary school buses; our superintendent was by far the highest paid public school employee in the county and rarely appeared in our school; and our school was seemingly overstaffed in certain areas.

With the abrupt resignation of the superintendent, many of us are hopeful for improvements. However, my personal conclusion from close observation over many years is that we must make a larger change. Lanesborough cannot expect to sustain excellent education for our students if we remain in a two-town district with Williamstown. They simply don't need to squeeze budgets as hard as we must, and their town culture is far different from ours, buoyed by the finest small college in the country, a major world-class art museum, and other features rarely rivaled in this part of Massachusetts.

For decades our children and our town have tried to keep up, sometimes with great success, but I have been told by knowledgeable people that the relationship with Williamstown is not always constructive for our teachers and staff, is not wholesome for a significant percentage of our students.

Today, Lanesborough's school-age population is in a steep, long-term decline, and our finances are very challenging. Recently, Lanesborough's leaders called for a $100,000 reduction in the elementary school budget for fiscal 2016. This is understandable, since today, on a per capita basis (Mass. Department of Revenue), we spend 40 percent more on public schools than does Williamstown; our tax rate is 20 percent higher than theirs; and yet we don't have budget capacity to properly maintain our town buildings, roads and cemeteries. And, we don't provide proper resources for our seniors, library, social activities, or essentials such as public works.

I believe Lanesborough can continue to nurture excellent outcomes for our children, but this is far more likely if we are not the solo, junior partner for Williamstown.

Robert Barton is a member and past chairman of the Lanesborough School Committee who has been leading an effort to get the school district to explore different superintendency options .

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