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Lanesborough School Committee Delays Vote on Superintendency Union
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
10:56PM / Wednesday, October 29, 2014
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School Committee Chairwoman Regina DiLego conducts Wednesday's meeting; James Moriarty is at left.

School Committee member Robert Barton's calculations.


Parents and teachers spoke out against attempts to dissolve the union with Williamstown Elementary.

LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — The School Committee on Wednesday put off a decision on whether to end its affiliation with Williamstown Elementary School.

Robert Barton and James Moriarty, who forced a special meeting of the committee to vote on the dissolution of Superintendency Union 71, agreed to wait until a recently formed ad hoc town committee conducts its study of options for superintendency services for the pre-K through 6 district.

At a well-attended 4 p.m. meeting of the three-person committee, at least eight residents commented from the microphone or their seats. All but one [the wife of a School Committee member] spoke in favor of maintaining the current arrangement in which Lanesborough and Williamstown share a central administration with Mount Greylock Regional School. Several of those comments drew applause from others in attendance at the school's cafeteria.

Richard Cohen, who is running unopposed for the Mount Greylock School Committee in the Nov. 4 election, came with data supporting his contention that SU71 is not too expensive and has been beneficial for the town's elementary school pupils.

Barton, the most outspoken critic of the union, gave a brief presentation focusing on the elementary school budgets in Williamstown and Lanesborough.

Several residents questioned why the School Committee was voting on an issue that the Board of Selectmen two nights earlier appointed a nine-person committee to study — a committee that includes Barton.

The turning point of Wednesday's meeting came when Moriarty said he would vote to dissolve the union unless he was convinced the town was "committed" to study the affiliation.

"I'm committed to looking at alternatives other than SU71," Moriarty said. "Whether that [town] committee does it or we do it or in some combination. If I don't see a commitment, I'm going to force a vote tonight."

At that point, Chairwoman Regina DiLego (also a member of the ad hoc committee) read aloud from the study committee's charge, which was posted more than a month ago, to demonstrate to Moriarty what it would study.

"Fair enough," Moriarty said.

That ensured the Superintendency Union will continue ... at least until the next School Committee meeting on Nov. 19, but possibly until the December meeting. DiLego noted that the original posting by the Selectmen said the study committee's work would take at least eight weeks — a term that appeared to satisfy Barton and Moriarty.

Nevertheless, Barton did not withdraw his original proposal, which brought about the extraordinary meeting.

The timing of the meeting itself was questioned by members of the audience.

"I'm a teacher, so I'm lucky," resident Michelle Johnson said. "I can be here. But I know there are at least a dozen parents who want to be here but they can't because they can't take time from work."

"You owe an apology to all the parents who had to take time off from work to be here," said Christine Canning-Wilson, who also will serve on the town education study committee.

Canning-Wilson harshly criticized committee members pushing to seek break up SU71 and affiliate Lanesborough with another school district in the county.

At one point, she told the committee that she had been talking with state officials about how to initiate recall measures against members of the panel.

She accused committee members of having secret meetings with other districts to talk about their finances, specifically the cost per pupil for administrative services.

"If you're going to continue to have closed-door meetings with these people, I'm going to call [state Attorney General] Martha Coakley's office," Canning-Wilson said.

She seized on the comments of dissolution advocates who have mentioned the Central Berkshire and Adams-Cheshire districts in particular, as options.

"All you have to do is go on [the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's] website, and you will see Lanesborough is a Level 1 school," she said. "Adams-Cheshire is a Level 3 district. ... Dalton is a Level 2 district."

Level 1 schools are the highest performing schools on a scale of one to five.

"The comments from DESE scream wonderful things about this district under [Tri-District Superintendent] Rose Ellis," Canning-Wilson said. "Rose is not my best friend, but I respect her as an educator."

Cohen came armed with a number of those "wonderful things."

In 2014, Lanesborough was the highest performing school in Berkshire County on the state's Cumulative Progress and Performance Index, which looks at narrowing proficiency gaps, growth and graduation rates over a four-year period. The number of Lanesborough students achieving "proficient" or "advanced" scores on the commonwealth's math and English assessment tests has risen steadily in the six years since SU71 began.

Earlier Wednesday, the commonwealth's secretary of education praised Lanesborough's program during a site visit.

"His comment about our [sixth grade] math students was they were doing north of a sixth-grade curriculum; they were headed toward calculus," Principal Ellen Boshe told the School Committee in a report on Secretary Matt Malone's visit that preceded the SU71 discussion.

Cohen's presentation, which he made enough copies to have on hand for members of the public, challenged the notion that Lanesborough pays too much for its administrative services.

After discussing all the district's academic successes since the creation of the union, Cohen pointed to numbers from the state indicating Lanesborough paid 25 percent less per pupil for administrative services than did Central Berkshire for the period 2008-12, the last year for which data is available.

Cohen joined a number of voices asking why the School Committee had not studied the issue more before jumping to a vote.

"You've had most of this data for months," Cohen said, referring to the information in his handout. "Why have you not asked any questions about it?

"Because you are rude to me," Barton shot back. "You have accused me of Open Meeting Law violations that have been rejected by the state attorney general three times."

Above, parent Michelle Johnson speaks out against dissolving the union; right, Richard Cohen presented a detailed argument of the union's success.

In August, the AG's office declined to review an OML complaint against Barton and the Board of Selectmen on the narrow grounds that the complaint was filed too long after the alleged violation.

"Although we do not review the merits of the complaint, we remind the Board that 'deliberation' is defined in the Open Meeting Law as an oral or written communication through any medium, including electronic mail, between or among a quorum of a public body on any public business within its jurisdiction," Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sclarsic wrote in response to the complaint.

In July, an OML complaint by Cohen was rejected by the AG's office. That complaint involved an incident in which Barton was stopped by the district's legal counsel from discussing the job performance of a Tri-District employee in open session.

On Wednesday, Barton presented his case for dissolving SU71 with a single slide that purported to show the per capita incomes of Williamstown and Lanesborough ($31,087 and $21,836, respectively) and each town's per capita cost for education ($1,246 and $1,747, respectively).

Barton said Lanesborough is treated like a "poor cousin" in SU71 and showed the audience a slideshow with pictures of the Clark Art Institute and Williams College's '62 Center for Theatre and Dance alongside shots of the Lanesborough Historical Commission's building and Lanesborough sidewalks in disrepair.

Barton did not explain how private nonprofits in Williamstown that pay no town property tax relate to Lanesborough's finances.

He did argue that the Tri-District administration's inattention to Lanesborough's needs are to blame for recent shortfalls in the elementary school's budget.

DiLego challenged that assertion and questioned Barton's and Moriarty's motives for pushing dissolution of the superintendency union.

"Your decision to leave SU71 has absolutely nothing to do with any educational value for the children?" DiLego asked. "It's based on your thinking that Williamstown is responsible for the fact that this School Committee has not monitored its budget."

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