WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Wednesday declined a request from its chairman to allow her to step down from the position.

 

Carolyn Greene asked her colleagues for a vote to replace her as chair with two months left before the panel's regular November reorganization, citing the personal toll of several months of in-fighting on the committee.

 

"For the past several months, we have experienced a level of contention at meetings and over emails that I have not been able to resolve," Greene said, reading from a prepared statement. "It has been an enormously draining and time-consuming process, and it's taken its toll on me."

 

Greene said the district's legal counsel advised her that rather than simply announcing she would step down, she should ask the committee for a vote.

 

After a protracted discussion that included input from all seven committee members and members of the school's administration, no one on the committee was willing to make a motion calling for Greene's replacement.

 

The discussion was marked by praise for Greene's tenure, suggestions for how to mitigate some of contention among committee members and rehashing of some of the issues that brought Greene to this point.

 

"It's been a very long four years," she said at one point. "It's a long time to serve as chair of this committee."

 

Part of the reason why she has occupied the post for so long is that during her tenure, the district faced major challenges, including the retirement of its superintendent, a concerted effort by elected officials of one of its two member towns to break up the district and an ultimately successful campaign to undergo a major renovation and addition project.

 

"I really appreciate what Carrie's done," said committee member Richard Cohen, the focal point of much of the dissension on the panel. "I believe I nominated her my first meeting on the committee to be the chair when there were others who wanted to be the chair. I thought it was important in a difficult time to have continuity."

 

It was clear on Wednesday that continuity has come at a price.

 

"She has a job outside of being chair of the Mount Greylock School Committee," Assistant Superintendent Kim Grady said, encouraging the six other committee members to consider Greene's request. "She has a job, a career. She is a mother, a wife. It takes a toll. I don't think it's fair to her.

 

"Everyone is saying they want her to continue, but no one is offering what could change."

 

Greene ended up offering several suggestions of her own about what can change.

 

One step was her suggestion that committee members direct questions regarding district business to the superintendent rather than potentially start the kind of email disputes between herself and her colleagues that have become common recent months.

 

"It's one thing to feel in contention with community members about a new building and another to feel in contention with your committee members," Greene said. "That's where the minutiae, the questioning, the challenging comes into it.

 

"I've been in the line of fire for years now, and I need to step back. I really need to step back."

 

She also recommended the committee act to define its own protocols, define the roles of its subcommittees and define the role of the chair.

 

Cohen, who earlier this year filed an Open Meeting Law violation charge against Greene and other officials in the Lanesborough-Williamstown Tri-District, said she had suggested "important ways for us to move forward" and added his own recommendations.

 

Cohen proposed that the committee institute a yearlong process of "goal setting, strategic planning and budget setting," use each meeting to do in-depth planning for its next meeting and be more assertive in its role regarding "education matters" at the junior-senior high school.

 

The last point has been raised by Cohen repeatedly at School Committee meetings and came up during a two-hour workshop by a representative from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees at the beginning of Wednesday's session.

 

"The guideline we often give is the School Committee deals with the 'what' and the administration deals with the 'how,' " the MASC's Dorothy Presser told the committee. "If you think of the budget, that's the biggest policy document you deal with all year. How it happens gets left to the administration.

 

"You might say, 'We're going to add a foreign language.' That's the what. How it happens, how it gets scheduled, the specific textbooks chosen — that falls into the hands of the administration."

 

The elected committee then has a responsibility to check in and monitor how its initiative is implemented and how successful it has been, Presser said.

 

At another point during the workshop, Cohen attempted to get Presser to agree with him that a recent move by Greene was "clearly a violation of the Open Meeting Law."

 

This new allegation — different from the OML Cohen already has on file — regarded the committee's self-evaluation process. In August, Greene initiated that process by emailing the evaluation form to committee members and asking them to send their responses directly to Presser, who would "compile the results and get them to us prior to the [Aug. 31] meeting."

 

Presser ultimately did not take that step because only three members of the seven-person panel completed the form.

 

Cohen attempted to make a case that Greene was circumventing the Open Meeting Law with her email in a two-page memo circulated to committee members and again during the workshop with Presser.

 

Presser, a 19-year school committee member who has served as a district governance support coach in a program sponsored by MASC, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, said Cohen's charge was groundless.

 

"If it's just information for your [pre-meeting] packet, where is the deliberation?" she asked him. "If there's information that's distributed to you in the packet that's not going to be deliberated on before a meeting, I don't know where the violation is."

 

Another conflict that bubbled up this summer on the regional school committee concerned its Policy Subcommittee.

 

The district needed to draft new policies and have them approved by the committee before the first day of school on Sept. 6 in order to come into compliance with state law. Greene, who was under the impression the little-used subcommittee had just one member, asked him to liaison with the administration and draft the policy.

 

Steven Miller declined, telling Greene that the work needed to be done by a subcommittee with a posted, public meeting and insisted that School Committee member Chris Dodig was a member of the subcommittee.

 

On Wednesday night, Dodig said he did not recall being on the subcommittee, but he did not dispute Miller's assertion that minutes of prior committee members indicated he was.

 

"I didn't remove anyone from the subcommittee," an exasperated Greene told Miller at one point Wednesday. "I was told there was only one person on the subcommittee. And the pushback and the pushback and the pushback — it's very difficult to maintain any sense of leadership when the challenges are numerous and often on the same point."

 

Greene ended up appointing School Committee member Wendy Penner to serve with Miller on the Policy Subcommittee, which promptly decided to delegate Miller to work with the administration on drafting the policies, which were approved later at Wednesday's meeting.

 

Going forward, the School Committee decided Wednesday to keep the Policy Subcommittee in place with those two members and institute the following practice: Policies that are designed to bring the district in compliance with DESE regulations will be handled by a single committee member in concert with the administration and district counsel; policies that deal with district-specific procedures will be hashed out in a full subcommittee setting, not necessarily requiring the presence of an administrator.

 

All policies, of course, will continue to be discussed and voted on at full School Committee meetings before implementation.