WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The interruption in benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has the Mount Greylock Regional School District looking for more ways to address food insecurity in the families it serves.

 

Superintendent Joe Bergeron on Thursday told the School Committee about how the district and its three schools are working to lessen the strain on members of the school community.

 

"We started by strengthening our relationships with the local food pantries in Williamstown and Lanesborough," Bergeron said at the committee's monthly meeting. "One challenge we noticed is that sometimes for families or our high school students, who are sometimes the ones responsible for procuring food, the opening hours for food pantries are during the school day, which is not ideal for those students.

 

"We have established a food pantry at Mount Greylock Regional School. Thanks to the staff and [Assistant Principal] Samantha Rutz for leading that."

 

Bergeron said the middle-high school held a staff food drive that has been broadened out to include the student body.

 

"It has yielded a wonderful mountain of food that is heading home with students on a daily basis in a manner that is discreet but as effective as possible," he said.

 

The district also is getting food drives going at its two elementary schools. That involves coordinating with caregivers to pick up food or set up delivery, though, since the items cannot be sent home with students as they are at Mount Greylock, he said.

 

The district also is planning community meals for members of the school communities to be held in the elementary school cafeterias, Bergeron said. Mount Greylock's food service staff and other staff will help prepare and serve food at the events, planned for later this month.

 

"We will be making sure families are aware of that opportunity," he said, referencing planned notification on the district's ParentSquare app and fliers. "As we push toward Thanksgiving, we're looking at ways to navigate that lengthier break as well.

 

"We want students and families to self-identify as much as possible, but we also are working through all the channels we do have to identify students and families who might benefit."

 

Bergeron called the on-campus food pantries and planned dinners, "an extraordinarily bright spot in a pretty dark moment."

 

He also shared with the committee some good news on the funding front. The commonwealth has confirmed that it will be able to continue to fully fund school breakfast and lunch programs through the end of December.

 

(After a federal judge found that SNAP had to be fully funded, the state immediately filled recipients EBT cards for November before a stay was issued on Friday night.)

 

Thursday's School Committee meeting started out with the panel's annual reorganization.

 

Julia Bowen and Christina Conry will continue in their positions as chair and vice chair, respectively, and Steven Miller will continue to serve as the committee's secretary after 5-0 votes.

 

The committee also voted unanimously to endorse a proposed structure for a steering committee for the Northern Berkshire Regional Collaboration and/or Regionalization Group.

 

Last month, the Mount Greylock committee agreed to join North Adams Public Schools, Hoosac Valley Regional School District and Northern Berkshire School Union in looking at ways the four districts might work together to mitigate spiraling costs.

 

Representatives from the four districts met and decided to form a steering committee to develop a request for proposals to find a consultant to help collect and analyze data for the districts. The proposal on the table last night called for the districts' superintendents to serve as ex officio, non-voting members and for each district to appoint two school committee members and two representatives of their member municipality or municipalities.

 

Miller, who was the lone dissenter in a 5-1 October vote to have the two-town district join the conversation with its North County peers, joined in a 5-0 vote to agree to the steering committee structure on Thursday. But he did emphasize again the challenges of creating a "super region."

 

"It's regionalization and/or collaboration, so it's very broad at this point," Carolyn Greene told the committee. "There was mention [at the inter-district meeting] of the failed vote in South County and the fact that regionalization was the only option on the table in that case."

 

In other business on Thursday, the School Committee heard from its Outcomes Subcommittee, which gave an update on its progress and discussed its goals for the 2025-26 school year.

 

One area where the district has made significant strides — in two of its buildings — is chronic absenteeism, defined by the commonwealth as 18 or more days of school missed for excused or unexcused absences in a given academic year.

 

At both Lanesborough Elementary School and Mount Greylock, the district saw a significant decline in absenteeism from 2024 to 2025: from 19.3 percent of all pupils to 7 percent at LES and from 17.8 percent to 11 percent at Mount Greylock.

 

Williamstown Elementary School, on the other hand, saw an increase, from 8.7 percent of pupils in 2024 to 11.3 percent in '25.

 

Elfenbein, who serves on the Outcomes Subcommittee with Miller, said that some of the issues at WES are "structural" in that a large percent of the school's families have one or two parents employed by Williams College, where the academic calendar does not align with the public school's. He also said, "not all absenteeism is bad," referencing specific reasons like supporting a family member in a health crisis.

 

"Trying to figure out how to more personally address students and their families … is more of a concerted effort at Williamstown Elementary this year," Bergeron said.

 

The district also is continuing its efforts to lower than desired math scores on the eighth-grade MCAS and elementary school writing scores that, while still above state averages, have been declining in recent years.

 

On the math front, Elfenbein reminded his colleagues that the district is in the process of implementing the I-Ready math curriculum, the first overhaul to the way math has been taught in the local elementary schools in 20 years.

 

"I think over the next three to five years, we'll see gradual but significant improvement in math across all grade levels," Bergeron said.