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Mount Greylock Debates Lanesborough School Union Vote
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
02:37AM / Saturday, October 25, 2014
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Mount Greylock Regional School Committee members Robert Ericson, left, and David Langston found themselves once again on opposite sides of a question before the panel. Neither is standing for re-election on Nov. 4.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The wedge being driven between Williamstown's and Lanesborough's public schools may finally cause the split.

The Lanesborough School Committee is scheduled to vote on Wednesday whether to withdraw from the Superintendency Union 71 effective next June.

And it appears the commonwealth may approve of the dissolution effort.

The committee will also vote on speaking with other school districts about sharing a superintendent rather than joining with the Williamstown and Mount Greylock Regional districts to hire an interim.

As it has for much of the last 10 months, the continuing effort to break up SU71 overshadowed the business of the Mount Greylock committee — which on Thursday night included a glowing report card on the latest round of state assessment tests and a report on the burgeoning cooperation between Mount Greylock and Williams College.

And the discussion of the fate of 7-year-old SU71 sparked a testy exchange between a couple of committee members.

Together with the regional junior-senior high school, SU71 employs a single superintendent and central administrative staff in an arrangement known as the Tri-District.

But since last winter, when the then-chairman of the Lanesborough Committee first floated the idea, town officials in Lanesborough have periodically returned to the concept of dissolving the union. Last month, the Lanesborough Selectmen sought volunteers for a committee to study the question.

It appears the time for study may be over.

Robert Barton, who made the initial call to break up the union, and James Moriarty have "compelled" Chairwoman Regina DiLego to set the meeting and voting agenda for Wednesday.

"There have been no public forums, no data compilation, no research and no plan for an alternative school district to take in Lanesborough students," DiLego responded to an email inquiring about the meeting.  

Mount Greylock's school committee has been following the issue closely because of its potential impact on the Tri-District structure as well as the educational experience of future Mount Greylock students.

Currently, pupils in both the elementary schools are learning under curricula aligned by a common administration. Educators say that alignment makes the transition to seventh grade at Mount Greylock easier. There are also opportunities for professional development and co-curricular programs among the faculties at all three schools that potentially could be lost.

This summer, advocates of preserving SU71 and the Tri-District were relieved when an official from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said a single school committee could not dissolve a union on its own.

Now, that story may be changing.

"We don't know at this point how DESE will rule on that," Mount Greylock Chairwoman Carolyn Greene said on Thursday. "We're still waiting on a legal opinion, but all indicators are they will render an opinion that does allow a single committee to leave a union. That's not the opinion Christine Lynch gave previously.

"[DESE] also indicated the educational bar for leaving a union is set pretty low. It can be [done with] a financial argument as opposed to an educational argument."

Tri-District Superintendent Rose Ellis said Thursday that she is disappointed the districts do not have a definitive answer from DESE on the issue.

"School unions go back to, I guess, the '30s ... and basically [DESE] said they have not had any issues before," Ellis said. "When districts agree to break up, there's been a consensus. What we have here is a different situation that is complicating the simplicity."

Members of the Williamstown Committee have repeatedly called on its partners in Lanesborough to commit to making SU71 work.

However, Mount Greylock Committee Vice Chairwoman Sheila Hebert, a Lanesborough resident, and Greene, a Williamstown resident, agreed that a dissolution of the elementary school union could work to the advantage of Mount Greylock's efforts to expand the region from its current size (Grade 7-12) to a pre-K-through-12 district.

Mount Greylock has devoted a great deal of time and effort to studying expanded regionalization, but it put the effort on the back burner when it was invited into the Massachusetts School Building Authority system. In recent months, the committee has talked about renewing the regionalization push and seeking a vote in both member towns as early as this spring.

"No matter what the Lanesborough Elementary School Committee does, it shouldn't deter us from regionalization," Hebert said.

Greene added, "It may be if they vote to leave, it will encourage people to vote for regionalization."

"I think the people of the town [of Lanesborough] are ready for a vote," Hebert said.

Mount Greylock Regional School Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Greene, right, said state officials are indicating that the Lanesborough School Committee may be able to unilaterally disband SU71.

Despite that optimistic assessment, Greene's news of the impending Lanesborough vote and hints of DESE's response touched off an angry reaction from committee member David Langston, who was participating in his final meeting.

"I find that extremely irritating - that the school committee would get the bit between its teeth when it's clear from town meeting votes that the opinion of the town is distinctly different from that," Langston said, referring to near unanimous vote in June at Lanesborough's annual town meeting to fund a feasibility study on renovating or replacing Mount Greylock's building.

"For DESE to go ahead and proceed on narrow legal grounds, I don't get it. I am now wondering if this isn't the moment we need to get in touch with our legislators ... and ask them to get in touch with DESE and put pressure on DESE to consider community opinion.

"I'd like representatives to step in and say this cannot happen on the basis of two malcontents who were elected to the School Committee."

But the committee's other outgoing member, Robert Ericson, challenged Langston's assertion that the Mount Greylock panel knows the "will of the people" in Lanesborough.

"Before we get so high and mighty, we need to remember that we're a small representative group of our two towns," Ericson said. "We decided to get rid of late school buses as a budget concession, and the townspeople came back and told us it was a bad decision."

DiLego said there has been no support for dissolution by those attending Lanesborough School Committee meetings.

"Every time [Barton] brought up the topic at a School Committee meeting, it was met with opposition by those in attendance during public comment," she wrote.

Ericson is also a member of the Lanesborough Board of Selectmen, which voted in January to give Barton money to study whether SU71 should continue.

"I think this is going to sort itself out," Ericson said on Thursday. "I sense from the meeting we had Monday with the School Committee there was a little bit of give and take on the issue. I think this would be a good time for our committee also to think about give and take."

"You either have a union or you don't," interjected Langston.

"There are contentious issues coming up, and both committees could compromise on some of the issues," Ericson said.

At that point, committee member Colleen Taylor said Ericson was being vague about what "issues" he meant, and Greene attempted to direct the committee back to issues that directly concern the junior-senior high school.

One of those issues is a suggestion being floated by Lanesborough officials to "take back" the town's seventh- and eighth-graders and use them to fill space at the elementary school.

Greene said such a move would derail efforts to address inadequacies in Mount Greylock's infrastructure through the MSBA system.

"I'd like to say on the record that we are in the building program as a 7-through-12 district," Greene said. "If we don't come up with a [building] project the towns can support, then we can start all over and talk about reconfigurations. But we can't talk about that while we're in the building program."

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