WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday approved an agreement with its union to require face coverings of all staff while inside school buildings when classes begin next month.

 

Superintendent Jason McCandless noted during the public portion of the committee's special meeting that Tuesday morning's decision out of Boston supersedes the local edict, but the memorandum of agreement negotiated by the district sets ground rules for how it will deal with the face-covering issue going forward, even if the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education reverses course.

 

Under the MOA, which is pending ratification from the Mount Greylock Education Association, the local mask mandate will remain in effect until the district's Joint Labor Management Committee for Health and Safety decides otherwise by unanimous vote.

 

The JLMC was established during the 2020-21 academic year to assess local health data and decide whether the district would hold in-person or virtual classes.

 

The memorandum also specifies that the agreement, which will be in effect only for the coming academic year, will require staff to either submit proof of COVID-19 vaccination or participate in the district's pool testing program. Vaccinated staff and students also will be allowed and encouraged to participate in the pool testing program.

 

Mount Greylock previously had announced it would require students in grades K through 12 to wear face coverings while indoors. But while it could make that requirement unilaterally, the district needed to negotiate an addendum to its collective bargaining agreement with MGEA to enforce a mandate on staff.

 

"There is a mandate coming out from the governor, a mask mandate for all educators and students," Carolyn Greene said after the committee returned from an executive session to review the MOA. "I believe it's K-12, which will supersede this agreement. If the state mandate expires on Oct. 1, this will continue to be in place until it's removed, per the agreement."

 

The School Committee voted, 7-0, to approve the MOA as drafted and moved on to a conversation about vaccinations, specifically whether the district should request information about the vaccination status of students at the middle-high school.

 

McCandless said the administration plans soon to start requesting families provide that information on a voluntary basis, and he wanted to use the meeting as an opportunity to inform the committee and the public at large.

 

"The mandate [Commissioner of Education Jeffrey] Riley has suggested he will be pushing out is that all students and staff will be expected to be masked regardless of vaccination status through Oct. 1," McCandless said. "At that point, districts will have the opportunity to show that they are are 80 percent [vaccinated] or above in a given building, at which point the mask mandate could possibly go away for masking of vaccinated individuals. That's my reading of the policy.

 

"We really don't have a vehicle for requiring parents to report vaccination status. So we will reach out to middle and high school families for voluntary reporting, simply so we can quantify the number vaccinated."

 

Although McCandless said the request of families was a step the administration could take on its own, he suggested that the School Committee could vote in support of his plan. Greene made a motion to that effect.

 

Julia Bowen said she agreed with the intent of the motion but was not sure it was a matter on which School Committee input was needed.

 

"Typically, we don't, as a board, say how the job should be done," Bowen said. "I want to be clear we're not overstepping our bounds."

 

McCandless said Bowen was correct in her assertion that the School Committee did not have a functional role in the decision but it could not hurt to have buy-in of the district's elected representatives.

 

"Superintendents have grown a little more comfortable moving forward with things out of the ordinary knowing they have the support of the School Committee," McCandless said. "But in the large picture, you're right. This is operational.

 

"The state is clearly saying: Here is a metric. We're providing a metric at which point we feel it's appropriate to consider taking away mask mandates. … We really just need an operational vehicle to quantify this so we can have a more informed decision about masking going forward."

 

The committee voted 7-0 to support McCandless' plan to ask families to voluntarily supply vaccination status on middle-high school students and, when COVID-19 vaccines are available for younger children, pupils at the district's two elementary schools.

 

The School Committee on Tuesday also voted unanimously to authorize the administration to approve minor change orders on a $1.3 million project to make improvements to Mount Greylock's athletic fields to bring them in line with Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

 

District Business Administrator Joe Bergeron pointed out that the general contractor on the project has brought the administration suggested changes from the design developed by the district's architects.

 

Some of the changes would add to the project's bottom line and others — like potentially installing shorter backstops than called for at some of the fields — would represent cost savings. Bergeron estimated that if the current change orders on the table are made with the current estimated cost impacts, they would add about $6,000 to the project's bottom line. But he asked the committee to authorize the administration to approve change orders up to $25,000 — or 1.9 percent of the bottom line — to give the administration some flexibility to keep the project on schedule.