Carole Castonguay was elected the spokesperson to present the findings to the Board of Selectmen last Thursday.

LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — The task force looking into school affiliation issues for the Selectmen has completed its research.

 

The committee presented a pro and con list for eight possible affiliation options but isn't recommending any specific one. The research was accompanied by pages of statistics including enrollment numbers and per-pupil spending.

 

"We did not make a recommendation. We made a series of lists," said Carole Castonguay, speaking for the group.

 

The committee, established in November, first identified the spectrum of options and eliminated three that were not feasible. Those three were the creation of a "super region" with many Berkshire towns, the town running its own K-12 district, and creating a charter school.

 

From there the group crafted 34 criteria with which to measure each form of governance. 

 

"We might not have gotten all of the attributes but we feel these are the important ones," said task force member Ronald Tinkham.

 

The eight measures were keeping the status quo, separating Supervisory Union 71 and Mount Greylock as it had been before the creation of the tri-district, reverting to a system similar to SU69 in which Lanesborough is the largest town in a union, fully regionalizing with Williamstown and Mount Greylock, expanding the current tri-district to include more towns, keeping the region but working on shared-service agreements instead of a union, joining a different pre-K to 12 region, and expanding Lanesborough Elementary to 8th grade and then tuitioning the high school students out.

 

One consensus the committee did reach is that with each of those systems, communication among the partners needs to be improved.

 

"Every single one of them we put 'healthy conversations," said Castonguay. "There are so many conversations with an elephant in the room that never gets discussed. Then there is an elephant that just keeps getting bigger. ... Possibly this whole process is because of a lack of healthy conversations."

 

That elephant is the deep-seated feeling of inferiority and inequality among Lanesborough parents and students within Mount Greylock.

 

This is because of a cultural divide, the group said, between Williamstown and Lanesborough. 

 

Examples of this have been cited by residents, this group, the School Committee, and other town officials in the past. But, the committee feels it hasn't been handled appropriately. That conversation is outside of the research committee's charge but nonetheless was so pervasive that members felt the need to make note of it.

 

"We acknowledged that they were there but we didn't discuss them," said Regina DiLego.

 

The Selectmen are now in charge of dictating whether or not one affiliation option or the other should be looked at more and the implementation steps plotted out. But, they want to know more about those "elephants" and how to tackle them - especially with a proposed new high school building project looming.

 

"We're trying to help get everybody moving in the same direction," said Chairman John Goerlach.

 

Ronald Tinkham and Carole Castonguay both said there needs to be improved communication among towns.

The Selectmen asked the task force to start looking deeper at those issues. Castonguay said many people in town have different examples of inequality or reasons so a much more open discussion would be called for. But, the group will meet and work out a list of issues that aren't being discussed right now.

 

"There is more equality that may have not been there before," said Christine Canning Wilson.

 

Tinkham put some of the onus on town officials - saying a lot of the communication issues come from the town's failure to bring them to the attention of Williamstown officials.

 

"We need to have more communication with our neighbor to he north. We need to involved them more and not just our studies and our results," said Tinkham. 

 

And in opening that conversation, Tinkham says "you'll find a lot more similarities" than some might think.

 

Outside of those affiliation options, the group is also suggesting that the bylaws be changed so as to give the voters the ultimate decision on any changes to the school affiliation. Currently, the three-member School Committee makes that decision.

 

The group also suggests expanding the School Committee to five. It also recommended items like the utilization of the current Elementary School and school choice and tuition should be looked at in all of the options.