*This article updated on Wednesday evening to correct the reference to budget apportionment in the Mount Greylock School District. While capital expenses (like the new building project) are apportioned based on enrollment and state equalized value, the operating budget is apportioned solely based on enrollment.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A veteran member of the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee explained to the Board of Selectmen on Monday why the school wants to ask both member towns to expand the region in November special town meetings.

 

Carolyn Greene explained that there are several options to address deficiencies in the Tri-District arrangement that binds the three independent school districts: Mount Greylock, Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary. But there is one option that the school committee favors and another that the committee definitely wants to avoid: the status quo.

 

"What we're talking about now is streamlining a cumbersome and inefficient structure, and I can say that because I helped create it," Greene said. "Structurally, it's not sustainable."

 

The School Committee's favored solution received a less than enthusiastic initial reaction from the board, whose members met Greene with questions but no commitment one way or the other. 

 

The "unsustainable" Tri-District arrangement does benefit the schools by keeping the districts under a central administration. Educationally, the alliance promotes coordinated curricula and allows educators to look at the "whole child." Financially, there are economies of scale in allowing the three districts to share a superintendent, assistant superintendent, business manager, director of pupil personnel services and central office staff.

 

The downside is that the central office — in particular the superintendent — reports to three "masters," the three different elected school committees. And, in fact, there is a fourth master in the form of the Superintendency Union 71 Committee, a combination of the Lanesborough and Williamstown school committees.

 

Other inefficiencies occur behind the scenes, where paperwork for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that could be produced once in a regional school district is instead generated three times — once for each school.

 

And school committee members have concluded that the current structure is an impediment to hiring a superintendent, leading them to keep the district's interim superintendent in place and put off a search for a permanent replacement until after the regional expansion question is resolved in the fall.

 

The inefficiencies have been apparent for years. The first Tri-District superintendent, Rose Ellis, warned about the problem with finding successors to deal with the complicated multi-district structure during the last year of her tenure.

 

And the Mount Greylock School Committee took the lead on finding a solution as far back as 2013, when it created a multi-district, multi-town committee to look at amending the regional agreement to include the two "feeder" elementary schools. Mount Greylock sought and received a $50,000 state grant to study regional expansion and ultimately voted in September 2013 to recommend putting the question to the towns.

 

"In October, 2013, we were admitted to the MSBA building process," Greene reminded the Selectmen.

 

At that point, the regional school committee hit the pause button on regional expansion in order to focus on the deadline-driven Massachusetts School Building Authority process that ultimately led to the expansion and renovation project currently under way at the junior-senior high school.

 

"Mount Greylock always has intended to bring regionalization to a vote," Greene said. "It just took us four years to get back to the table."

 

The Mount Greylock committee unpaused the process earlier in the 2016-17 academic year and this spring is reforming the Regional District Amendment Committee, whose task should be lighter because a lot of the groundwork has been done, Greene explained. Mostly, the committee's job is to update the 2013 data and relaunch the public outreach campaign in advance of the November vote.

 

"We know there other options," Greene said. "We know we can look at stepping back. We can separate out Mount Greylock from SU-71. We can split everybody up and go back to what it was before it was a [superintendency] union — three separate districts with three separate superintendents. We can do it piecemeal — share here and there. We can hire additional staff to bolster the current structure.

 

"I think we'll find that none of that is educationally beneficial to our kids, and all of it will cost money."

 

Full regionalization will not necessarily save any money at the local level, school officials say. It would secure and solidify the cost savings realized by sharing central administration, but there are no new savings to come.

 

Greene told the Williamstown board on Monday that, on aggregate, the three schools would cost local taxpayers about the same as they do now. Regional school districts do receive a little more state aid to fund transportation (an incentive from the commonwealth to regionalize), but that would be offset by higher labor costs as the contracts at the three schools are aligned; by law, no employee could be harmed economically by the region's expansion.

 

"I've been saying for seven years, it will be a wash," Greene said. "The difference is the impact on the towns because of the agreement."

 

As at Mount Greylock, where the budget is apportioned based on student population from each member town, more of the budget for a proposed pre-K through 12 district would fall on Williamstown.

 

The Selectmen did not press Greene for specifics on the projected financial impact on Williamstown's assessment for schools under full regionalization. Its members did ask about whether all other options had been explored and about how the town could maintain some level of local control over its elementary school in pre-K-through-12 region.

 

"To me, this is an advocacy challenge that you have for the next six or seven months," Chairman Andrew Hogeland said. "People will ask … what are the other options? I haven't seen anything written about the elementary schools being solo. I haven't seen anything written about fixing the current setup.

 

"In terms of voter education, you need to spend a little time digging a little more deeply into these other options. Why are they not OK? [Interim Superintendent Kim Grady] will explain orally why something is not a good idea, but that's not in the public domain for people to see. If you're going to sell regionalization, you have to compare it to these other options … so people can understand better what's going on."

 

Three members of the five-person board pressed the issue of local control. Greene and Grady, who assisted in the presentation, said that Williamstown Elementary would see a larger role from the School Council, a state-mandated body that has not always been a priority at the school because it's somewhat redundant in a single-school district.

 

"The WES School Council was dormant for a period of time," Grady said. "[Principal Joelle Brookner] worked hard bringing it back. They have input with us when working on the budget. At each of the schools, they will remain. That's your local control."

 

Hogeland recommended the draft regional agreement, available on the Tri-District website, be updated with language that helps codify what can be directed at the local level.

 

One issue would remain controlled at the local level: the number and location of schools in the district.

 

Four years ago, when the RDAC drafted a revised regional agreement, it included a clause specifying that no school can be closed in any of the member towns without the consent of all of the member towns — a noteworthy provision in light of recent events in the neighboring Adams-Cheshire Regional School District.

 

"The first question I got when I went to the Lanesborough Board of Selectmen [in 2013) to talk to them about regionalization was, ‘When are you going to close our school?' " Greene said. "So we put in that clause. … That's the kind of feedback that's helpful. And Andy's feedback about structuring in some local control is helpful, too."

 

In other business on Monday, the Board of Selectmen heard presentations on a pair of citizen-generated articles for the May 16 annual town meeting warrant: a proposal to discontinue municipal use of the term "Columbus Day" and call the holiday "Indigenous Peoples Day" and a resolution declaring Williamstown a "Pollinator Friendly Community," where landscape practices favorable to bees are encouraged.

 

The board will make its recommendations on those and all town meeting articles at its first meeting in April. The pollinator resolution is on the agenda for the town's Agricultural Commission at its April 5 meeting.