WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School District this summer will roll out plans to improve its incident response policies and practices.

 

Interim Superintendent Joseph Bergeron last week told the School Committee that the steering committee of staff members, family members and School Committee members has been able to merge best practices from districts around the country with what already is working for the district.

 

And the working group will begin rolling out the changes as early as the end of this month for review by the full committee and community at large, Bergeron said.

 

He said the goal has been to evaluate and modify how the three-school district responds to any type of behavior that warrants intervention.

 

"That could be bias-based incidents," Bergeron said. "It could be Title IX-type incidents. It could be bullying. It could be all types of behaviors that would trigger a response.

 

"First off is a district-wide definition set of tiered behaviors. Tier 1 behaviors are things that cause concern, perhaps for the student themself or ways that behaviors are causing disruption in classrooms. Tier 2 behaviors are things that do cause harm to others but do not warrant a particularly swift and severe response to immediately ensure the safety of all the students and the community as a whole. Tier 3 behaviors do warrant that immediate response to ensure that safety is preserved for everybody in the school community."

 

Full definitions of those tiers and links to the existing district policies they reference should be available before the end of June, as should a plan for the response protocols, Bergeron said.

 

"It's a very methodical approach to tiered responses that are also very progressive as occurrences and severity increase," he said. "We are doing that keeping The Equity Imperative very close and looking at how to put restorative practices first within each of those responses to behaviors."

 

The Equity Imperative is the consultant the district hired with American Rescue Plan Act funds supplied by the Town of Williamstown.

 

To manage incident reports and track the steps taken to respond, the district is looking into software to help manage the process, Bergeron said.

 

"The work flow ... straight through to the end of that response, that also is embedded in how we're thinking about using software for accountability and ensuring that we at the district level are able to see and understand what is happening in each of our three buildings," he said.

 

The superintendent said that the district will have more information to share with families before the start of classes in late August and indicated that the district will be training staff both before the start of the 2025-26 school year and beyond.

 

Bergeron said a six-month process guided by the Chicago-based consultants allowed the steering committee to get a sense of what works and produce the best process possible for the district.

 

"Nobody has the perfect structures, but we were able to look at different examples, pull them together, merge them with what we already have that is working to develop a new approach that I really do think could be exemplary and could serve our students uniquely well and our community uniquely well," he said.

 

One of the main orders of business at the School Committee's June meeting was its evaluation of Bergeron and the renewal of his contract for a second year as interim superintendent.

 

The district's assistant superintendent, who stepped in when Jason McCandless left the district without explanation last spring, received high marks from the elected officials, who said he, "has provided steady and responsive leadership during a year of transition, taking on the dual responsibilities of interim superintendent and business administrator."

 

He also got a pay cut.

 

But Bergeron sought the latter, a request that sparked a "difficult debate" in the executive session that preceded the public vote to approve his contract.

 

"This was a difficult conversation for us," Julia Bowen said. "We know he was an exemplary superintendent. He argued that more people [in the district office] are taking on more of the work.

 

"This was a difficult debate for us because we believe strongly Joe is still responsible for everything that goes on in the district, no matter how he helped develop other people to take on work."

 

The committee voted 6-1 to approve the contract extension with Jose Constantine voting no.

 

That vote came at the end of the meeting. Earlier in the meeting, the superintendent updated the committee on the district's efforts to combat chronic absenteeism, defined as 18 missed days, or 10 percent of a given 180-day school year.

 

The district's chronic absenteeism rate has fallen 10 percent in the last three years, from 24.7 percent of students in the 2022-23 school year to 14.7 percent in the school year that ends this week, Bergeron reported. In the same period, the state average has gone from 24.5 percent to 19.3 percent.

 

An outlier is Williamstown Elementary School, where chronic absenteeism declined last year along with the district's other two schools but rose in the 2024-25 school year., to 15.8 percent.

 

Bergeron said there are individual stories behind each of the WES pupils who have been chronically absent, and the school is addressing concerns on an individual basis with children and families.

 

"We have had a higher percentage of students than usual who have been sick for significant stretches," he said. "Those are not excuses, but they are part of the data. So we're trying to make sure we focus in on students where we know it's not spending time in another country with family but, instead, students we can speak too directly with their families and make sure they're in school a lot more often next year than they were this year."

 

Bergeron began his superintendent's report by acknowledging the staff members who will not be in school when classes begin in August.

 

The district is seeing eight educators retire at the end of this year and one more planning to leave early in the fall, he said.

 

At the middle-high school, Mount Greylock will see the retirement of teachers Tom Ostheimer, Karl Belouin and Mary MacDonald and paraprofessional and student support person Ann Martin., who Bergeron described as making "massive contributions and bedrocks of not just teaching personality and culture at the school."

 

Lanesborough Elementary says goodbye to nurse Kathy Larson, paraprofessional Kathy Pemble and reading specialist Beth Nichols, who, Bergeron said is "somebody who finds every way possible to help every student she's able to touch."

 

Williamstown Elementary retirees are teachers Corrine Benn and Betsy Reali. Bergeron spoke of his experience with the former as the parent of a pupil in her class and noted the latter's contribution to music and the arts at the school.