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Mount Greylock Building Project Moving Quickly, Seeking Input
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
03:22AM / Thursday, April 30, 2015
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Interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy, School Committee Chairwoman Caroline Greene and Vice Chairwoman Sheila Hebert.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — After years of waiting to get into the Massachusetts School Building Authority's system, the Mount Greylock building project is moving at high speed.
 
"The calender moves faster than a lot of us even realized," Building Committee co-Chairwoman Paula Consolini told the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday night.
 
"We will be undergoing an intense review of building improvement options in June and July. That includes a base repair, a renovation — which can be a part build or part destruction — and a new building.
 
"The preferred design approach, which includes a partial schematic, will be presented to MSBA by Aug. 6. That means a choice from among all those options."
 
And the final up or down vote from Williamstown and Lanesborough voters on whether to fund a building project will come in spring 2016 — possibly before the annual town meetings in each community.
 
Consolini admitted that the lightning fast pace is demanding, but she said there are advantages.
 
"You're focused sometimes when you go fast and it stays in people's minds," she said. "It will be easier, in some ways, to educate people."
 
Right now, though, the committee still wants to be educated by the community about its priorities for a repaired, renovated or rebuilt Mount Greylock.
 
To that end, one of her goals in appearing before the School Committee at Tuesday's monthly meeting was to promote the Building Committee's second "community forum," scheduled for Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m. at Lanesborough Elementary School.
 
Consolini and School Committee Chairwoman Caroline Greene agreed that the first forum — last week at Mount Greylock — was productive.
 
The Building Committee is looking to be more proactive in its efforts to garner public comment. It has a survey placed at both town halls and strategically throughout the two member communities, and it is planning more public listening sessions — not just at the dysfunctional junior-senior high school.
 
"What we have to do once again is reach out very aggressively," Consolini said. "This is where going to various community centers — going to Lanesborough Elementary, maybe the fire station — to get people involved.
 
"Summer will be a challenge. People will be away. It's important that people know about the opportunity and the imperative to get involved."
 
And the Building Committee has an imperative to continue to make the case about the need to do something about the district's current facility.
 
"People may hear 'visioning' and think, 'Uh oh, they're building a Taj Mahal,'" Consolini said. "Far from it. We need to build an efficient facility that also serves the educational needs very well.
 
"We're going from a facility that is one-third too big."
 
Besides making a smaller Mount Greylock, the building project also aims to make one that is more efficient. On Tuesday, Consolini reiterated a theme that is raised repeatedly by the project's advocates.
 
"We're estimating pretty conservatively that at least $300,000 is spent [each year] that wouldn't need to be spent if you had an energy efficient building that was even a quarter size smaller," she said.
 
The Building Committee has a meeting scheduled for Thursday evening at the high school to continue its work, which Consolini reported is on schedule.
 
The School Committee on Tuesday had a relatively light agenda, but it did make a decision on a slight increase in school choice slots that was requested by the administration.
 
Building Committee co-Chairwoman Paula Consolini updates the Mount Greylock School Committee.
Principal Mary MacDonald told the committee that 17 of Mount Greylock's rising ninth-graders had applied to and been accepted at Charles H. McCann Technical School in North Adams.
 
While she was not sure that all 17 would end up enrolling at McCann, it is apparent that Mount Greylock's class of 2019 will be a little smaller than the 107 currently in the eighth-grade.
 
"Even if just 10 go and stay [at McCann], the total number will come down," she said. "We're positioned right now to have a heftier class, and I'd like to open up five [school choice] slots.
 
"We always pitch 100 as our target mark. That gives us flexibility if kids come back. ... Looking at the budget, that seems like a very safe number."
 
Sheila Hebert argued that the committee should be more conservative in its creation of school choice spots in the class and ultimately voted against the five slots, which were approved on a vote of 6-1.
 
Richard Cohen used the discussion as an opening to pitch greater coordination between Mount Greylock and its "sending" schools, Lanesborough and Williamstown Elementary schools. Currently, the school committees in the two single-school elementary districts use school choice to fill out class sizes in individual grades without necessarily worrying about the impact down the line at the junior-senior high school, Cohen said.
 
Cohen later pushed for another bit of cooperation between the three members of the Lanesborough-Williamstown "Tri District."
 
During a discussion about a comprehensive policy review, Cohen proposed that the three school committees form a joint task committee to look at policies that are shared verbatim among by all three districts.
 
Earlier in the meeting, Greene noted that the recently completed search to find a permanent superintendent was marked by strong cooperation, a change in the recently strained relationship between the school committees.
 
"The process was incredibly smooth," Greene said. "It was time-consuming, but everything went smoothly, even the process of deciding on a contract.
 
"I think we've turned a corner ... fingers crossed."
 
In other business on Tuesday night, the committee heard an audit report from Thomas Scanlon of Scanlon & Associates, who reported that the district's books are in good shape.
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