Minutes – Dec 15 2016

BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington                    Stockbridge                 West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING – MEET & CONFER

BHRSD District Office – Conference Room

December 15, 2016 – 7:00 p.m.

Present:

School Committee:    S. Bannon, W. Fields, K. Piasecki, J. St. Peter, A. Potter, R. Dohoney, A. Hutchinson, D. Singer, D. Weston, S. Stephen

Administration:          P. Dillon, S. Harrison

Staff/Public:                J. Briggs, E. Mooney, Brian Fairbanks, B. Doren, M. Berle, K. Burdsall, M. Young, K. Farina

Absent:

List of Documents Distributed:

Hand-outs from Brian Fairbanks
Personnel Report dated 12/15/2016
Hand-outs from Financial Subcommittee Meeting

RECORDER NOTE:  Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed during the meeting and after the fact from live recording provided by CTSB.  Length of meeting:  1 hours 51 minutes.

CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order @ 7:00pm.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE 

The listing of agenda items are those reasonably anticipated by the chair, which may be discussed at the meeting. Not all items listed may in fact be discussed, and other items not listed may be brought up for discussion to the extent permitted by law. This meeting is being recorded by CTSB, Committee Recorder, members of the public with prior Chair permission and will be broadcast at a later date. Minutes will be transcribed and made public, as well as added to our website, www.bhrsd.org once approved.

MINUTES:  None

TREASURER’S REPORT – None

SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT–

• Dillon – Welcome. I am glad so many people were able to come out.  Tonight we are talking about Brian Fairbanks and he is one of a number of people who are on the Berkshire County Education Task Force.  He is going to give a talk and distribute a packet about what that task force is doing.  There may be some things that generate questions which he will answer as he goes and at the end.    B. Fairbanks – I run Jiminy Peak and I got asked to be involved with this a year and a half ago.  I asked my son who was involved with MCLA for about 10 years, if I should do this because I don’t know anything about public education; I am a businessman.  He said that I might have some insight.  A year and a half later, my wife is asking, “what did you do this for?”, but the truth is, I have never tackled such a complex situation and, I really have become immersed and wonder what does Berkshire County do?  When I got involved I began to recognize very quickly that Berkshire County needs to be looked at as an entire community.  If you look at each one of our towns as silos, the potential for education deterioration is various pockets of the county are bad for the county as a whole.  When I say that, it is difficult to think, how do you get businesses to come to Berkshire County if you don’t have quality education?  Our population is down to about 127,000 people.  It was 150,000 for a long time and as you look at that declining population and the aging population that is going on, there are lots of things that have ripple effects on what is going on with education.  I am committed to believe that it truly is our children, our community and our future.  We need to try to look at it as a broad perspective but also we need to look at each community as an individual community that has its own situations.  There are some towns, this town is not one of them, that on the brink of disaster in terms of saying what are they going to do with education.  Many times we can look at it and say that is their community, it’s not going to have an effect on mine.  If one town goes down, the other towns are affected dramatically in terms of what they can raise for taxation.  What the task force as done for the last year and a half is we have met every third Saturday.  John Hochridge is the chairman of the task force and he selected 27 people from throughout the county that he felt had a broad perspective from their community.  The reason he knew all these people is because he is on the school committee association for District Six which is all of Berkshire County.  He has known everybody for these years.  He has been involved with North Adams public education for about 15-20 years and he happens to be Jiminy Peak’s weatherman so I have known him for 40 years. John picked people that he said, if you are going to get involved you need to come to meetings every third Saturday and we concluded that we didn’t want people who weren’t going to make the commitment.  I have been awestruck.  I am the only business person on this task force; everybody else is a professional educator.  We do have people from the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association, retirees, Berkshire County Planning Commission, the President of Berkshire Community College, Senior Management from MCLA; so it is a very broad perspective of people taking a look at what do we do and where do we go.  The meetings have been robust.  Over the last year and a half, we have realized that there were lots of numbers that we thought we accurate but we wanted to make sure that we weren’t missing something.  We went around last January and we raised $75,000 from the Berkshire Business Roundtable, Williams College, Berkshire Bank, Taconic Foundations and many individuals as well as $500 from almost every school committee in Berkshire County.  We had a sea of money and a commitment from everybody to say, we need some further research done.  We hired the Donohue Institute from UMass to help us.  They just finished a report in October and the summation of it is the last three or four pages in this report.  I am going to give it to you in more layman terms and you can read some of the detail at the end.  The essence of what we came to realize, if you look at the bullets 2/3s of the way down the page, is that there was declining enrollment for all Berkshire County public schools.  We are going to show you a graph in a minute but the enrollment in public schools from the year 2000 to 2015 has been 22.3%.  As enrollment is going down, costs to run the schools is going up and it is disproportionate throughout the county in terms of some schools having a higher acceleration of their operating costs than others but everybody is seeing rising costs.  One of the big factors of that is what are the retirement benefits that the schools are continuing to have to pay.  In some municipalities, it’s buried within the city.  You don’t know exactly what the educational portion is unless you did a full-blown audit.  Many communities do know what is going on with health insurance, my pension benefits for teachers.  Everybody is living longer.  If you look at a teacher that is now getting another 10-15 years of benefits from the community, the drain on the budgets is going up dramatically in terms of saying, we have this obligation, there is nothing we can do about it.  Therefore it is going to stifle the ability to say what else can we do as we look at educational options in the future.  At the same time, we are looking at declining or flat revenues.  One of the biggest ones is Chapter 70 money.  I will never pretend to understand how Chapter 70 money calculated.  It is a really complex formula.  The state is going to make that money kind of flat then we are not really getting any inflationary benefits from Chapter 70.  It maybe isn’t flat but it sure isn’t keeping up with the rising costs to operate the schools.  Probably one of the most troubling things that we came to realize, the Donohue Institute did a deeper dive, is the erosion of quality education options for high school students.  We also recognize that it has happened on the elementary school level but it has been more material in terms of some students can’t take AP French and Physics because their school is so small they can’t offer it at two different times; you have to pick one or the other.  There are 19 different schools in districts throughout Berkshire County, some having bigger challenges than others.  In each one of them, there as been some erosion over the last 15 years of what the options are compared  to where they were in 2000.  That is going to continue.  There is no way that is having declining enrollment can look at it and say I am still going to offer several levels of physics because we do not have enough students to fill the classes.  We see it as an issue that is not going to go away.  We believe as a task force that the county as a whole, things are going to get worse.  That is a very discouraging picture but at least we are looking at it to see what we can do going forward.  Once we got through all the information and data at we believe to be accurate but we wanted a third party to confirm it.  We went to a legislative body and they helped us get $150,000 grant to be able to say we need a phase II study to be done.  The governor came out to Taconic High School, I gave a presentation, in the middle of the presentation he said, I am going to pledge to you, you are not going to lose your $150,000 for this even if I have to do some cuts.  We have been assured that what he did to get rid of $98 million that we are still going to get our $150,000.  We went after a number; we didn’t know what Phase II was going to cost but we felt we needed enough of a number that we could go out and see if we could entertain requests for proposals for people to do the phase II.  We put out Phase II proposals to people a little over a month ago.  The deadline for people to respond to it happened to be today.  They request for the proposals was very onerous.  The firm that responded favorably today did do work for the state of Vermont.  They have had great experience in dealing with the collaboration and we hope to have them on board by January 10th or 15th.  We need to go through a few legal alleys to be able to stamp it going forward with the hope that by the middle of July, working with them, we will be able to come back with some recommendations for models that communities can consider.  Our task force has no authority.  None whatsoever.  All that we are trying to do is help develop some options and road maps for the future that might allow communities that have more challenges than others to look at alternatives to how they get through those.  I wish I could sit here today and say I think I have a clue as to what those options might be.  Eight months ago, I thought I had a clue.  There are 47 schools in Berkshire County, one being closed in the last 15 years.  Out of those, there are 11 high schools, 36 elementary schools.  When you look at the capacity of the schools and you look at the enrollment trends, simplistically eight months ago I said it’s simple…you should have six or seven high schools and you should probably be able to get rid of 10 elementary schools and you can be more efficient from a financial standpoint.  It is not that simple because communities can’t merge so easily if they happen to have union contracts with the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association that are different from that community.  There is travel times in terms of buses, there are schools that may have a debt on them and what are you going to do about the debt if you merge them with another community.  The simplicity of looking at mergers or bringing schools together because it may have financial benefits, has to be evaluated on many fronts to see if it is going to work.  We are going to be in the process over the next six months, heavy lifting is in front of the task force, what are we going to be able to come up with and what are the benefits that we think communities should take a look at by taking a different direction.  The state of Vermont, Pennsylvania and Maine have all experienced this similar situation that Berkshire County is facing.
• Dillon – the research and experiences were messed up in Pennsylvania and Maine. They didn’t get much community input, the created a lot of chaos and it didn’t work particularly well.  They got through it well and they are reorganizing.  Vermont is just in the middle of it and it looks like they have done it quite a bit more thoughtfully.  They came up with a range of models; they suggested a minimum size.  If you got to the minimum size, they gave you some financial incentive.  If you chose not to get to the minimum size, there were some sticks and overtime it will force you to find a dance partner.  We think the work in Vermont is a bunch of steps in a good direction to be a model.  Different communities handled it differently.  The state didn’t say there is one way to get there.  The state said here is a guideline around some numbers; figure out on your own what works best for your communities.  The parts of Vermont where school districts are connected to mountain passes and some of those roads close in the winter, so what looks good on a map.  The statehouse might not get that but the community gets it so they figured out different things.  B. Fairbanks – the firm that responded happens to be the firm that worked with Vermont.  They spent two and a half years with them.  They have committed to come to 80% of the meetings.  We have to ratify if we are still going to go forward with them.  It is a group that we think is very much collaborative; very much willing to roll up their sleeves  and work with us and recognize that the situation throughout Berkshire County doesn’t have a simple one fix.  We were with the Richmond group last night and that message came through.  There isn’t a super one recommendation to fix the situation so what we are going to try to do with the next phase is to say what has to be addressed educationally, financially, how do you logistically look at organizational shifts that are going to be changed, how do you deal with all of the legal requirements that go on between one district v. another, how do you deal with a political and social ramifications.  One of our task force members happened to be a superintendent of a large school system and he heard from people saying you are not going to jeopardize our football team.  This superintendent was very clear and said I would be surprised if there are five football teams in Berkshire County in ten years.  I don’t think there are going to be budgets enough to support five football teams or have enough kids in the school system to support a football team.  Last night when we shared that with Richmond, the gentleman who was pretty verbal said, everybody has to hear that.  Don’t be bashful, share that with people because it is a reality that people don’t want to look at.  It is one of the critical examples.  The emotional element of this whole process is going to be our biggest challenge.  What I like about this firm that we got through Harvard is they believe you have to find pathways that give people can see benefits going in the right direction that outweigh the detriments.  That is going to be an exhaustive search process.  I will seek your input at the end.  27 of us are on the task force and 19 of us are going out to every communities in Berkshire County and trying to share with the school committee, the selectmen and the finance committee what we know at this moment in time so at least people are enlightened to what we are trying to do going forward.  I am not going to read the next page, which is our mission statement, but it in essence says we are trying to just figure out what can we do to that will be fair and provide a sustainable education going forward in the future.   The enrollment in Berkshire County is going to decline another 11%.  There were roughly 21,000 students in 2000; there are 15,900 today in 47 schools; one closed.  If you look at that, the enrollment has gone down almost a quarter.  No schools have closed.  Tied into that fact, the average utilization of schools’ capacity is 60% throughout Berkshire County.  Don’t take that literally because special education takes up more space than it did 30 or 40 years ago when the schools were built.  The general guidelines and capacity of the schools is very much underutilized.  If you look to the future, that 11% is pretty predictable.  Last night we had people saying “why can the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission say this is predictable?”  Berkshire County is declining in population; it’s aging in population and less children are being born.  If you look at what is going to happen in schools over the next two years, we can almost predict it within a 5% margin of error.  It really is predictable.  If you look at the slide, it is showing you what has happened over the different time periods and the next one is actually showing you what is going to happen to the population from age 5 to 19 between 2010 and 2040.  It is four different organizations giving us this prediction.  One of them happens to be a little more optimistic than the other but three of them are saying that it is going to be on a declining slope for the next 20-25 years.  If you look at that and say “how do we prepare for it?”, that is the reality as we go forward.  The next slide talks about the declining enrollment.  Expenditures have been going up as enrollment has been going down. Chapter 70 funding has not got up to where it needs to and it probably is not going to change considering how the state’s finances are taking place.  The tax levy on the towns have gone up 19%.  You can look at the 5 year fixed snapshot as to what has happened to the towns.  The next graph is probably to me the most troubling graph facing Berkshire County.  Every black line that is on there shows towns that are close to their tax levy limit.  They can go up with a town vote of going over by 2 ½ but every town that is on the red line is within a couple years of reaching their tax ceiling limit.  I didn’t understand the different 10 months ago but when you reach your tax ceiling limit, you cannot raise any more tax dollars.  If you take a municipality like Pittsfield, and they get to the top of its tax ceiling, they have no choice but to cut back because they cannot raise anymore dollars from taxation.  It is a critical number.  What happens is, if the assets within that community decline in value, then they are going to hit that ceiling even faster.  In many communities like Stockbridge, the assets are probably going up so you are not getting as close to that ceiling as quickly.  When you look at the five communities that are really looking in the next five years to hitting that ceiling, the ripple effect is going to be felt by other communities and the wellbeing of Berkshire County is going to be affected by it.  The task force is a group of people as listed here, and it give you a good cross section of who John went to say would you be willing to help us over the course of the next couple of years.  I have been totally awestruck.  The average attendance has been 20-22 every third Saturday.  The time and the commitment that people are putting in is phenomenal.  The last few pages are merely a synopsis of what we received from the Donohue Institute.  You will be asking of your new consultant, “what if we do nothing?”, because we think you can predict five and ten years out and take a look at certain communities and say we know what is going to happen to the enrollment.  There are five elementary schools in Berkshire County at in ten years will have less than 15 kids.  That is an element that if you are going to look to do with those five schools.  You have to look to bussing.  How far are they going to go, is that school going to close, what do you do to try to deal with it?  We do believe that looking at doing nothing is important for us; not only eye-opening for ourselves, but for the county as a whole in terms of saying, “we don’t think that is viable.  We believe we need to find some other ways to make a difference.”   Questions or comments?
• Bannon – I am going to take school committee first then open it up to others. Seeing none, called upon public… J. Bikofsky from Stockbridge – thank you for complementing Stockbridge.  I think the effort if terribly important.  It think it is very clear for a town like Stockbridge where we are approaching 25% of budget goes to education for 46 students that there are priorities in addition to education.  For example, Stockbridge has major road and bridge infrastructure situation that has be to addressed, so when you look at doing nothing, I think the thought here is doing nothing as an alternative to be placed aside.  The future as I see it is some form of regionalization or large regionalization dealing with schools of 15 students and yes, it is a political issue, yes it is a financial issue, yes it is a social issue where communities are very reluctant to give up their schools.  It happened in Stockbridge.  We were an example of that.  From my perspective, we applaud the effort and we look forward to a very meaningful solution, an in depth solution, to deal with this problem.  It is not only a solution that deals with tax levy.  Unknown Public  – I am also from Stockbridge.  I had a 35 year corporate career and taught at Ohio U and Appalachia.  I talked to welfare workers in Ohio and they indicated that the people they dealt with that went through the one room school houses were very functional and literate and they ones that came through the larger schools were not.  That 15 number, if done properly, may not be bad.  On the other hand, in terms of restructure, having a huge program in high school, I am not big on.  They can always pick it up in college.  One course in college covers a lot more than they do in high school.  I am not against restructuring and getting the costs back in line.  I am happy with the current arrangement that we have now and don’t want to rock the boat.  E. Abrahams of Great Barrington – I would like to talk about bus commute time for students because when we talk about consolidation, too often I don’t hear that mentioned.  I am wondering, is there a number of minutes, is there a maximum, is there something that this committee has in mind that is too much?  P. Dillon – not yet, but it is something we are really sensitive to.  A lot of the discussion has been that it has to be different for elementary school kids, middle school and high school kids.  There is a general consensus that high school kids can travel a little longer or a little more and folks are reluctant for little kids to spend too much time on buses.  There are places in two neighboring towns next to us and the commute would be no more than ten minutes.  B. Fairbanks – we have talked about so many issues over the last 18 months, but concluded that we didn’t want to take anything in a direction that we felt was able to be a recommendation.  We talked about the length of time but never came to a consensus.  It have taken us quite a bit of time just to come to the realization with the fact and figures before us and getting it confirmed by a third party.  All of those things when I refer to that listing are in front of us.  E. Abrahams – I am just happy to hear that it is on your radar.  Bob Salerno  from West Stockbridge – I have done a number of corporate restructuring in my career and I actually wish I had some some of the things you are doing.  Is there any linkage where the business community could reverse the population decline particularly with the youngsters.  You are a business person.  I don’t know if this is the vehicle to do that in but we are seeing the economic decline.  B. Fairbanks – it is linked.  The Berkshire Business Round Table which is about 35 business leaders gave us the biggest support of $25,000 to help us get the first phase done.  They recognized that education is critical.  If it erodes further it is going to be even harder to get any other businesses to go farther.  We have not taken that on as our charge because we feel we have enough challenge with our charge.  I can tell you that it has been brought to light.  I have made two presentation to the Round Table and two presentations to Williams College that everybody has become acutely aware that there has to be a concerted effort and work hand-in-hand to improve the educational opportunities for the future and at that same time find new businesses to come in.  There are quite a few efforts going on in Berkshire County to see what we can do to stimulate some new types of industry.  My son Tyler is very involved with the Round Table and was president of Berkshire Economic Counsel for three years so he has been immersed in figuring out how do we create a blueprint to help the county move forward.  The reason I am doing this is because I have been here for 46 years, I have built Jiminy Peak and my career in Berkshire County; I love Berkshire County and I look at it and say the betterment of Berkshire is dependant on that issue as well as this issue.  J. Ballfance from W. Stockbridge – after you made a great presentation.  I have checked your Facebook page and you have done an amazing job so far and I want to compliment you on what you have done and I look forward to seeing better things in the future.  I think you have done a great job.
• St. Peter – obviously Berkshire County is in dire straights and I was wondering if you have looked any other places in the state, counties or regions that have similar conditions. Are we alone in these type of circumstances?  B. Fairbanks – we are not alone.  I am going to let Peter speak to Franklin County and what they tried to do about six years ago and failed and why we think they failed.  I will talk about the Cape after he talks about that.  P. Dillon – Franklin County has pulled together another group and they send ambassadors from that group to attend our meetings hoping to share best practices and some ideas.  The three places that are really dealing with this right now in Massachusetts and are very different than some other cities in the suburban areas are Berkshire County, Franklin County and Cape/The Islands.  In lots of ways we are similar and have these extremes of wealth and poverty and not a whole lot in the middle and declining numbers.  Our geography is bigger than theirs but similar.  B. Fairbanks – John was fully aware what Franklin County tried to do and they tried to do it with about six or seven people then they tried to go out and sell it to the communities and they got destroyed.  It was a think tank of a small group who thought they had the answers and they didn’t.  John’s conclusion and a smaller group of us said we need to get the whole county involved.  Some towns might not have a problem but if their neighbors are having a problem, it will have a ripple effect.  We really felt it was important to do it this way.  It has been a painstaking process.  Public – I think you are onto something.  I think the thought I would submit to you is that as the process starts to unfold, what intention would you have to communicate to the various schools districts, towns, county, etc. so that you don’t drop a recommendation on them in six months.  How would you update them?  B. Fairbanks – I believe three or four months from now we are going to have some thoughts that we are going to need to come out again and say here are some things that are evolving so that we can get some feedback.  I believe that is going to be critically important if we are going to get support going forward.  The ability to keep people up to speed, we have a Facebook page and a website so that anybody  can see what we are doing.  We have our minutes posted.  There is nothing being hidden from anyone.  We invite people to come and listen to our meetings; we don’t ask them to participate until after the meeting in terms of questions.  The meetings run for about three hours.  We really do want to keep the community informed and that is the purpose of this and it is just the beginning.  P. Dillon – the website is www.berkshireducation.org.  There is some detail there.  Two other things that have come up are it is very clear that at some point we have to do a better job of gathering student voices and we are going to be talking with the principals about how to do that.  The big thing with getting student input is not getting input from the usual suspects.  As exciting and interesting as the student governments are, that is an important piece but we also want to hear from a wide range of kids.  There will need to be some focus groups and some idea testing as well.  B. Fairbanks – the surveys that the Donohue Institute did with superintendents and principals in the summer and fall, most of the people the saw had been in their positions for five years or less.  They asked them the question “have you seen much erosion?”  The principals said a little here and there.  Those of us that were in the executive group said we see some things in there so we asked them to go back and check again.  There are six superintendents have been here since 2000.  Go ask the same question to them.  We got totally different answers because they had watched what happened over 15 years not 3-4 years.  I use the word erosion because I look at it over time.  Cape Cod has been leaning on us to say we have a very similar problem, it may not be the same situation but nobody has tried to do what we are trying to do.  The governor has said to us very emphatically “I am not going to be the bad guy in whatever you do.  I want to support your collaborative effort because I believe it in and we are anxious to see what you come back with.”  I wish I could tell you that we have a vision of where we are going but I don’t know where it is yet.  S. Stephen – so the Donohue Institute made a recommendation to Vermont…P. Dillon – no the Donohue Institute did the Phase I study.  The District Management Council …. S. Stephen – what took place in Vermont?  You said there were some mistakes.  What were the recommendations this group had?  P. Dillon – they did it first on the high level as they were coming to come up with an ideal size per district and to a lesser extent per school but they left a lot of flexibility at the school level.  Off the top of my head, I don’t remember.  I think the magic number was around 1,100 or more for a district.  It was interesting because our district is there.  Vermont is different from us so they may make a recommendation to us over time that isn’t 1,100 may it’s 1,200.  If you then take that number and look at some of the other districts, then there might be implications that more districts come together.  Who you pick as your dance partner is the really complicated part and what it lets you do.  I think they had gotten down to the level of students’ schedules, range of offering, etc.  Something that comes up a lot particularly in south county is we have many fewer vocational opportunities than we once had and that is something that is very important.  McCann Tech does a nice job in a particular type of vocational education and the place is full.  There is some discussion if we need a McCann Tech campus here or something like that.  I think we will lean on this group to help flush out a range of options that we can pick from.  Rather than us re-inventing from scratch, they work on a national level so they have roots in Massachusetts but they have also done this work in other context so they can support us, guide us a little bit, we can push back and they can help us make adjustments.  S. Stephen – so what sort of incentives do they….P. Dillon – it’s always about money.  The hard thing is they parallel incentive for many years revolves around regional transportation.  The state has never fulfilled its promise around regional transportation so we would be nuts to not be skeptical around what potential incentives might happen because they are giving us in bad years $.35 on the dollar and in good years, $.70 on the dollar and never to my knowledge have they ever given us $1.00 on the dollar.  I think the financial one is one in this current governor’s administration there has been an interest in creating opportunities to remove red tape and bureaucracy; that is not a money thing.  Bill’s talks about this all the time; the crazy mandates so the part of the deal for redefining one’s organizational structure was you got waived out of a whole bunch of mandates that would be a great incentive.  I think the sticks work not increasing funding over time and in part in holding very little districts accountable for stuff that is very hard to do as a little district.  Public – I’m sure you have a future plan to engage the state legislature in this process; the house and state senators, etc. to get some input from them.  B. Fairbanks – we have kept our delegation, and that is the way we got the $150,000.  In the early beginnings of this task force, he was a participant.  We know we have to keep them involved.  It is another area of communication.  J. St. Peter – Vermont, Pennsylvania and Maine you said.  Were those entire state-wide reorganizations in those states?  B. Fairbanks – Maine was but I don’t know enough about Pennsylvania.  P. Dillon – parts of Pennsylvania were exempted.  J. St. Peter – but there state legislature had input and say in the final … P. Dillon – there are other things that Maryland has done where there are giant school districts.  I am not saying that is a great model but there is what we are doing in Massachusetts on one end, there is what is going on in Maryland on the other and sanity might be somewhere in between the two.  Public – didn’t John say that on the work in Vermont, 45 school districts were reduced down to 9 by July 1st this year?  It doesn’t mean that that many schools closed.  It means that the overhead for the school districts were reduced and they represented about 30 towns.  There were more school districts than towns.  P. Dillon – I think it is important to realize is there is the one tendency for us to focus on efficiency and cost savings, etc. and there is the other tendency that I think is arguably more important and that is to focus on quality education.  If we save a few thousand dollars here or there but the quality of our education deteriorates horribly, it is a bad deal.  A lot of the school work has been around how can we maintain high-quality education and do it in a way that is sustainable.  B. Fairbanks – there are two parts to education.  There is the student who wants to go on to college and has the skill set to be able to go on and has aspirations from there.  There is also the student that doesn’t have that skill set or aspirations and a vocational school is where they need to go.  They can be very productive members of the community if they have that opportunity.  I happen to have a step-son that went to McCann.  He is on the bus for 50 minutes each way every day because we live in Hancock.  He is a happy mechanic.  He has a dog and things he does in this life that he loves.  We can’t ignore the fact that we have to provide job readiness situations for those students that want to do that.  R. Dohoney – Do you anticipate looking at proposals in terms of funding mechanisms and formulas?  What is struggle with here is there is a lot of disconnect supporting the schools solely on real estate taxes.  What I point out to people all the time is they can complain about the state but our state income taxes are going to go down again next year and these charts keep showing with all of this funding going down, our state income tax has stayed flat or gone down.  While the tax levy goes up a lot of us affected, our taxes have gone down of that period of time; not counting federal income tax.  I don’t think that is good for our schools.  Do you intend to look at that, not just cutting dollars and cents but finding where the money is coming from and possible addressing that at the state level?  B. Fairbanks – sure we will look at it but we recognize trying to get more money from the state level is going to be a challenge.  P. Dillon – there is a big process going on at the state that foundation budget on how the formula is calculated and that doesn’t make a lot of sense and it hasn’t been updated in forever.  There is the possibility that it might move forward.  I think across the border, the New York State regents just voted the other day to put another $2 million into education to close historic gaps.  There are place that are doing this even in what we perceive as trying financial times.  I don’t know if the task force will spend a time doing it or it will connect to other existing groups that are doing it.  B. Fairbanks – you probably heard that Boston views us as Alaska and the attention we get from Boston is pretty much nil.  The effort to get the governor out here and trying to get him to realize that there is a Berkshire County wasn’t easy.  We are not giving up on that cause because we feel if we can get his ear, we have a chance.
• Weston – are you going to look at the impact that charter schools would have on us. I guess the consensus is that we have too many schools and districts and adding more, is that going to be a factor to look at?  B. Fairbanks – I am not a professional on charter schools.  I know that there are 450 kids in charter school in Berkshire County and there are 15,400 kids we need to deal with.  Trying to address the charter school direction and how does it deal with the broad education range we have, I don’t know how it fits in.  D. Weston – it is an interesting thing because you are talking about essentially too many schools then bringing in basically independent school districts.  On one hand we are talking about reducing school districts and on the other we are adding more.  It is kind of paradox.  P. Dillon – I think the education system is filled with contradictions and that is one of them.  Charter advocates would say, they are public schools, they just have a different structure.  One could agree or disagree with that but that is the argument.  D. Weston – I am not arguing with the merits of it.  It is just quite the quandary for us.  P. Dillon – the thing that might be different is the one charter school in Berkshire County has been here for a while and presumably isn’t going anywhere so how one works with the existing school might be different how one might work with a proposed school.  Maybe seven years ago, folks put together a proposal to do a charter school in south county and after that hearing I had to take a shower because it was so ugly.  B. Fields – but they didn’t get the charter school.  It was obvious from that meeting, I was there and I spoke, that all of the schools in south Berkshire work together to present a program to the board that said we don’t need them and that kind of swung it.  I talked to one of the members that was in a program that Monument had.  She graduated from the WISE program and couldn’t believe that we had it.  She said that made a lot of impact on her because I now have to listen to the charter people but the charter school thing…Bard takes money from Pittsfield so there are some real economic problems there.  I was going to say, I hope that in this Phase II…I think there are some easy answers.  When I was running for this board with Steve, I made a comment that people are looking at consolidation and regionalization as an easy answer to save money and I hope that is not what this study is looking to do in regards to the issue of formal partnerships with neighboring districts.  I think it will be part of it but to me it seems like there is more to it.  One of the things you said when you started it, there are more elements that you were ever aware of and one of things that I am very concerned with, being a former teacher and educator, as Dan is, is the philosophy of education that various districts have.  I was very fortunate to be in a district whose philosophy of education was very different to one that is five miles away.  That makes a big difference in offerings, requirements and how teaching is done and how students are attracted to a different school and the emphasis in one school is very different than another.  When someone said something about Friday night football, well that might not be the emphasis in one school that is 10 miles away so hopefully this study will also look educationally what is the philosophy of education that a district is based on and does consolidation and regionalization fit into the philosophy.  I like was Peter does before every town meeting.  What is the mission of our district and when you look at our mission and our philosophy, it differs in some significant ways from other districts.  I see a real problem in bringing … I know nothing is impossible but that has to be dealt with.  B. Fairbanks – living in north county, North Adams and Mt. Greylock, I know.
• Singer – when you were discussing vocational schools, is there a way instead of looking at putting school districts together just based on numbers, you are also looking at the kids that are served by each school? Monument for example, is there a certain population there that is not being served as well as a tech school?  Is there an emphasis at each school that maybe you need to look at the kids there and the makeup of what the educational needs are of the students rather than the regionalization of the schools and start there?  B. Fairbanks – is your question that if you are looking at high school, is the school providing what the students in that particular school need?  D. Singer – yes.  Since having moved to the Berkshires, I see the kids here having different needs from the kids in other places that I have lived.  I wonder if that is what separates us from Boston, etc.  B. Fairbanks – Peter said half an hour ago, we know that we need to get out and listen to the students.  D. Singer – that is what I hear people saying to me, “now that you are on the school committee, this is what I want” and “I grew up in this area and when I was here as a student, I decided to go to the Southern Berkshire district because they had a program to build houses.  When I was at the high school, I would go down there every morning when they would pick us up on the bus and I learned how to build a house over two years.  They gave us our math, etc.”  It seemed like it was very tailored for what the kids needed.  I don’t know if that population has changed a lot but it seemed to me like a really good way to see what is needed and a good way to reorganize the schools rather than saying this goes here and that goes there; talk to everybody at the school to see what they need at the school, do you do well, not so well, what do you think you are missing.  S. Bannon – historically, we the Southern Berkshire Education Collaborative and at the time it was very successful.  We had a house-building program, automotive (and still do), greenhouse, we worked with Southern Berkshire and we had a restaurant.  What we have to rethink and figure out is what…there are many reasons that it ended.  One of them was standardized testing and time on learning so kids were out of the classroom more than they were in.  Is that a bad thing?  Probably not but at the time it seemed like the only way to do it was disband that program.  If two or three school decide to join together, we need to figure out what the needs of the students are for that.  For one district, 50% of the students may want vocational, for another one might be 10% or is it a mix that will work.  I will tell you, this task force has some people who are very bright, very articulate and understand education and I am sure that will be addressed.  D. Singer – it seems also from a business perspective that there are a lot of people who could be employed by businesses in Berkshire County coming from a training program like that.  P. Dillon – I think the other shift we will see is the kind of vocational programs were the school was the center of it all will continue to evolve so instead of building in…at one point we had a pre-nursing program and we had a demonstration hospital space in the school and it seems over time it doesn’t make sense to have those necessarily on school grounds.  It would be crazy to build a fake lab to do demonstrative work when there are hospitals and nursing homes all over the place.  We have to figure out ways to get kids out of schools and into places they can do live work.  There are examples of that all over the country.  One of our challenges will be to figure out how to do that better.
• Public – at the governor’s meeting on August 26th, he seemed to exude some level of flexibility in recognizing Berkshire County difference because of the declining situation. Can you elaborate any on what kind of flexibility he was looking at?  He seemed like it was open to maybe removing some of those things you were talking about, Steve, like the standardized testing or different ways DOE was looking at for us.  He was also saying we are looking for solutions from the districts and the towns.  Are there solutions to get back to him?  Fairbanks – this is a hope that the work we do the next six months that he and Piser will listen and they will find ways to say how can they encourage us to do this and to do it in a way that looks like realistic opportunities to make a difference.  There is no guarantee that it will happen but I hope our relationship that we have developed with him and with Piser will help that to be a possibility.  Public – I congratulate you for being such a good ambassador.  B. Fields – Peter alluded to the mandates that DESE puts on school districts.  The figure I have from the superintendent in Ludlow, 14,000 in about 3 ½ – 4 years. 14,000 mandates.  I had a book that dealt with everything Peter has to do by law.  When I interviewed Peter before I took this position, it was 10 pages of nothing but mandates with the dates that they are due.  That is one of the things I hope this group…and I hope they don’t overlook the political because I really believe that is important.  The political…this idea, I just read it today, where they say they are increasing education but as Rich said at the same time we are going to have to have an income tax cut.  Whenever I see an income tax cut being proposed or being enacted, it means local taxes are going up.  They never tell you that.  When your state income tax goes down, something is going up and it is going to be the local.  I really feel that this Phase II also deal with the political.  The teachers should be asked…they should go into the schools….I got a lot out of this report that Monument Mountain did where people from the community came in and teachers were asked, not just department heads or project leaders, but teachers were asked to come and answer, “what would you do differently?”  Hopefully that group will do that and you will see that it will be political because when I did it with some teachers are Monument, the political aspect is really hurting the budget.  B. Fairbanks – thank you for your time.
• Dillon – We are going to go through some reports from the Finance Subcommittee meeting and start talking about what Eileen mentioned about where we are with the level-programming budget and get some feedback from the group as a whole, then maybe talk a little bit about some of the re-imagination work. Sharon would you talk us through the sheets.  S. Harrison – we have been talking about data and, this transitions nicely from what we were just talking about.  The first page talks about our enrollment summary for 11 years.  This is the summary that we do as of October 1 every year and we build our assessment percentages off of this.  As you can see in October, 2006, we had 1,472 students and this past October we had 1,310.  There is evidence there of what we were talking about with Brian.  The next page is the Resident Enrollment Trend Analysis and by the graphs you see that it blips up and down but mostly the trend is down so the total in FY2007 we had 1,057 students now we are down to 972 resident students.  This is our October 1 report numbers that we use for each of the following fiscal years.  So October 1, 2016 will be used to set our rates for FY18.  You will see what has happened here is Great Barrington has gone up 20 students or 2%.  Right off the top when we set our assessments there will be a 2% increase even if nothing else changed.  Stockbridge went down a bit and West Stockbridge was down about 14 students.  The next is the Non-Resident Enrollment which is school choice and tuitioned-in students.  You can see that there is a decline on that as well.  For new committee members, you will see between 2013-14 there was a sharp decline and the school committee made a decision to hold our choice numbers down and not to have us accept as many and we are going to try to get that back up because in addition to having lower enrollment, we have lost over $300,000 in choice income because we have not accepted choice student except when there is a set so we don’t add students and add classes.  We haven’t be able to cut in the same way, so that $300,000 has fallen to the assessment to the towns.  P. Dillon – Sharon, I didn’t notice this the first time but if you go back to the sheet about the resident enrollment, do you think the shift in how we implemented our choice is connected to the growth in Great Barrington resident students around the same time period?  If we had a low of 651 in 2013 and went up to 682 and that held steady.  I thought if people moved into the district because there was a smaller likelihood of them getting in through choice.  S. Harrison – I would have to talk to the principals but we only heard of only a handful of families that did that because of choice.  We have had a number of people move in from out of state and some from out of the country, that looked and came here because of our school system.  We didn’t see much of a shift.  If I were to look back at the choice students and then the change, we only saw a handful of families that indicated that to us.  R. Dohoney – how do you have a way of knowing.  S. Harrison – principals typically would hear from families and then I would hear.  A family would say, “we thought about choicing in, we know you are not accepting choice….”  R. Dohoney – I think the bigger point is that it was new students coming into the district from out of state who are now residents instead of choice.  The problem if they buy a house in Great Barrington and the real estate taxes go up because there are more people living there.  S. Harrison – the next one is the choice-trend analysis of receiving and sending students.  What you see in the big blip in both the receiving and sending 2006 between 05 and 07, we do believe that both the increase choice and the decrease in choice out is due to the new schools, the opening of the elementary and the middle.  The next one is choice out.  The request that we had was to look at where our students were going.  As you can see, the bulk of the students went to Southern Berkshire.  You will see that in 2009, 10, 11 as well.  We had a lot of young students that were going to Southern Berkshire for KDG, 1st, 2nd grades.  Part of that was the one-room schoolhouse issue; the other part we find when we house-surveyed families is that a number of families with young children who live close to southern Great Barrington go to Southern Berkshire because it is closer.  Then they transition back here for 4th grade when they are older.  Tuition In and Revenue Projection – we do have a tuition agreement that runs through next year, FY18.  I ran the numbers and we have a large 12th grade class graduating of tuition students and many fewer coming in.  If you see below, the school enrollment in home district, Richmond’s 8th grade has a class of 11 or 12 students but only 3 are Richmond students.  We typically get 80-90%.  Farmington River has 11 and you see that upcoming classes there are a few more in each of those districts.  This will impact our budget as well so our operating budget is going up and we will talk about that after but our tuition-in revenue is going down and fingers-crossed that our choice is holding steady.  Next page, we will talk about the continued savings for our move to the deductible plans.  The Berkshire Health Group is meeting next week; we were supposed to meet this past Monday, the 12th but because of the weather we moved that back to the 20th and there will be another vote to eliminate the value plus plan and move only to the deductible plan.  It won’t affect us because we have already made the move on our own.  I don’t know what the rates are so I used the FY17 rates and you will see that the annual gross savings this year is a little higher because of our move to MedEx but it is $264,098.  Our mitigation is over $118,000; we have a $149,000 net savings and then you see that the mitigation drops 66% in FY18, 33% in FY19 but our savings off of what would have happened if the value plus had staying in place continues to grow.  Our total gross savings is over $300,000 and our net savings is $170,000 that makes a huge difference in saving positions.  Next page is our projection of our E&D balance.  Every month after January, I start doing an analysis of where we are in our budget.  I watch it every time but start going penny by penny in January.  It is now $978,000 but after being audited it will be closer to $982,000.  We can keep up to 5% of the next year’s total budget in E&D.  I am projecting that the $978,000, it’s about 3.84%….so it’s the previous year’s E&D, which was FY16 in the following year which is actually this year.  So our total FY17 budget is just over $25 million; we can be a 5% but we are at 3.84%.  R. Dohoney – so that is what we will apply to this coming year?  That is our max E&D for the budget we are working on now?  S. Harrison – no that is the max that we could have in FY17.  Even though this is the E&D that gets certified to be used in the following year, it is not until we certify our FY17 do we know whether we hit our max for FY18.  What happens if you hit that or go above that max, you have to return that money to your community so what people generally do is in the last assessment bill you would bill that much less.  R. Dohoney – we are not going to hit any of this.  S. Harrison – I have put in a not-to-exceed recommendation for the new members.  We use our E&D to reduce our assessments to the town.  I do make a recommendation each year and for this year, I am recommending that we use the level-fund for FY17 and in the amount we were able to use in our regional transportation revolving fund last year for 2014 so that will leave us $763,000.  There are two issues with using the E&D.  First, your E&D like any private business, you want to have a reserve for emergencies; you really want to keep that there.  The second one is if you use your E&D which is a non-recurring revenue source for recurring operating expenses, the banks and the creditors don’t look on that favorably so I try to keep it low so it doesn’t look like we are using a lot of it to do….it really does affect our credit rating.  You will see the recommendation when we put the budget out and then the school committee to change that after we look at it.  What we have done over the last few weeks is we met with all of the administrators; we developed a level-program budget for maintaining high programs which might mean for special education in order to maintain our special ed programs in order to meet the needs of the students, next year, actually means adding a program.  I know that it sounds odd but we have a number of students that …. R. Dohoney – special ed is a program so to maintain a special ed program there is going to be more kids with different needs in that program.  S. Harrison – so it looks like we will be recommending at the middle school to avoid sending kids out, tuitioning kids out, to either other public or private schools.  We are still working on that.  Kate will be presenting details once she has that totally nailed down.  That said, our first run we can up with a 5.5% operating budget increase.  S. Bannon – to clarify that, it has nothing to do with revenue.  S. Harrison – right.  The 5.5% is just our operating budget, teachers, all of our expenses.  When we build the assessment to the towns, we first take out any revenue from choice and tuition, we get a net operating increase, we have our capital budget, then we take away all our revenue sources:  Chapter 70 which is the state funding.  Over the past few years that has only increased by about $20 per student so that is what I put in.  Chapter 71 as you heard before, I am very conservative on 71 because you never know if it is going to be 40% or 75% for transportation reimbursement.  If we get more money in the transportation reimbursement, we will set up a transportation revolving fund and that is what you see for the $89,000; anything we get above that goes into the revolving fund and we can use that next year in case we don’t get the revenue we project on the regional transportation.  We take all of that out, MSBA payment for the new schools and then we get the net assessment and that is what we use to assess our towns based on the student enrollment.  We are way at the top right now at that 5.5%.  We know that when that falls down because we don’t expect significant revenue increases; at the most I think we are going to be pretty steady.  We have to work on that; it won’t be acceptable to the towns.  We are going back to the drawing board and talk more with the Finance Subcommittee on the 10th and keep working.  We will keep you updated.  R. Dohoney – just be to clear, we didn’t look at the level-funding budget just to look at it.  In past years we made a conscious decision that we were going to start with that and tweak it or not.  B. Fields – can I ask a question about the 5.5%?  Great Barrington is going up 2% because of the 20 students?  S. Harrison – yes.  B. Fields – so do we add that to the 5.5?  S. Harrison – no, the operating is that top line.  That is just the operating budget expenses; that is not the net assessment.  R. Dohoney – the assessment will shift.  S. Harrison – 2% of whatever that increase will be due to the increased enrollment and as you can see the other two towns dropped.  This is just purely at the operating level which is why we know if revenue stays level, it drops down more.  B. Fields – are they any capital plans for Monument Mountain?  S. Harrison – we do not have that incorporated into the budget yet.  S. Bannon – I think that would be driven by the school committee.  J. St. Peter – Do we know how many kids in our district have choiced out to Richmond that might be returning?  That seems to be the trend.  S. Harrison – I don’t believe they are at the 8th grade level but I can look that up and get back to you.
• Re-imagination Update
• Dillon – everyone has a calendar of our upcoming meetings. Simultaneously, this is complicated because we also have this big working group of about 22 people who are involved in reimagination work.  All administrators are a part of it and we are focusing our work on three big areas. If you remember, we have busing and schedules, what we did around the music program or what Mary did around the 2nd grade, we are trying to write a little brief explaining the problem or the challenge, potential solution, the education implications, the implications for staff and families and kids and in cases where there might be budget implications.  So, the first big bucket is around busing and schedules.
  • Busing & Schedules – we are looking into what we might do differently with busing. To preview it a little bit, one of the things that has come up is there is a lot of research, the American Medical Association and everybody else is pushing hard and many districts are adopting a later start time for schools, particularly high school aged kids.  We are looking at that in collaboration with and potentially running a one-tier bus system instead of a two-tier system.  So right now we have the middle and high school kids on an early set of runs and the elementary school on a later set of runs.  Sharon is in the process of working on a bid with the bus companies and we are looking at a bid and alternative bid.  Potentially this could be something that could happen quite early if we could make a compelling agreement or it is something we could phase in over a year or two or it could be dead in the water.  We are looking at that as connected to schedules.  There are some real advantages to having all the schools on the same schedules also around professional development and sharing faculty and a host of other things.  There is also some downsides to that.  The most common one that people bring up is the impact on after school programs or athletics.  We will come up with some models and what would happen.  There is a national organization that I am following now called “Start School Later” and they are doing a bunch of work in Massachusetts.  It has some promise.  We have also talked about the private school busing.  We are obligated to do that and we have have some flexibility on that.
  • Roles & Responsibilities/Reallocating Existing Resources – How can we shift existing roles in different ways; how can we move things around and there are a host of ideas that have come up and we will present each one of them separately. Some are about people, some are about programs, some are about coherence in each particular area K-12.  Are we one the same page for math K-12, different approaches to curriculum according the buildings and how can we get that similar.  Another strand is the issues of substance use and abuse across the district and opportunities there.  This is the one we are thinking a whole lot of minor shifts that an aggregate could have a major impact with both instructionally and in some places financially.
  • Grouping Students – At different grade levels we group students differently for a variety of reasons and the most obvious kind of group is at the high school where there are different levels. There are standard classes, college prep and honors classes.  As kids gets older and departments decided to do it, there are some AP classes and in the departments that chose not to go the AP route there are some advanced classes that might as well be called AP classes but they don’t terminate in an AP exam.  There are variations of that at the middle school and less at the elementary school but the thinking is it may make sense in particular places to shift how we group students which is a pretty big shift philosophically and would be quite impactful on teachers and classes.  It could ripple through the schools in really interesting ways in terms of how students are grouped by ability and interest but also in what kind of numbers.  So if we were running some 9th grade math classes and there are all different levels, some of those classes might be large, some mid-sized and some small.  Presumably, if we had fewer groupings we are putting kids into then we might have more flexibility to have different kinds of grouping of students and that might realize some savings or opportunities.  In our district and in many districts, the most advanced classes are very small and some of our largest classes are introductory classes in 9th grade.  That doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The small classes should really be smaller to afford support and the large classes should be the most advanced students in upper grades because they don’t need as much support.  Weston – do the senior teachers get to teach the more sophisticated groups that are smaller.  P. Dillon – not uniformly but in our school and most schools, I think it is fair to say that there are people that would freak out about it and people that teach it at different levels.  It is a pretty common practice that more senior teachers tend to teach older kids in small groups and less experienced teachers teach younger kids in bigger groups.  That is backwards.  It is not universally so and I know different people at different times have taught large 9th grade classes but it is not as much the norm as it should be.  B. Fields – The kids as they move up the ladder in the high school tend to level themselves.  A kid that is not good in math is not taking calculus or AP math; they are going to take another elective in math.  The electives always kind of self-level but Peter is right; in the 9th and 10th grade the classes are larger.  I taught classes with CP and honors kids combined; that’s the way it is.  I never understood as a teacher sometimes how kids got placed in some of these classes.  It will be a good challenge to see what has been traditionally.  P. Dillon – This is another one that may not happen overnight and this is also one that I think we need to invest time, effort, money, professional development, etc. before the shift.    K. Farina – in terms of grouping at the high school, I would like to put out there that we do have thoughtful conversations at the department levels about class sizes and we try to make thoughtful decisions about what groups of students we want to keep at certain class sizes.  We have run the AP Calculus class with almost 40 students in it because we thought it was better to run it as one sections.  We are constantly having those conversations.  In terms of the reimagination, thinking about if there needs to be as much leveling and how can we rethink how students go through their day and regroup.  It is probably a different conversation than just the traditional leveling conversation.  R. Dohoney – from the jist of it, it sounds like you are trending more toward keeping the way it is at the elementary school and pushing that up higher rather than taking the high school and pushing that down lower; is that right?  P. Dillon – I think that is probably accurate but we are very much in midstream so the conversations about the elementary school about grouping are so complicated that I didn’t even bother presenting it.  I will now because you asked.  R. Dohoney – if it isn’t something you haven’t gotten to a conclusion on….P. Dillon – the high school example is an easier example.  There is not a conclusion at the elementary school but there is the way we group kids now, there’s are conversations about whether people will be in pods, with four classrooms in an area and should those pods be instead of four sections of first grade, should they be first, second, third and fourth grades grouped so they are doing things in a mixed way.  Should there be mixed grade-level groups for some reason; should there be some opportunities where a particular teacher might stay with a group of kids for multiple years, which is a practice that is used in many schools and there are some I am probably forgetting.  There are a whole range of possibilities.  What is hard about doing that sort of thing at the elementary school is anyone of those moves will impact whatever else is going on in the rest of the school, in probably bigger ways than mucking around with levels in the high school because elementary school kids largely spend their day with the same group of kids all day.  Lots of possibilities there and that may be an area where do we want to be really deliberate and take our time so it might be that we commit to researching it for a year with a hope that we don’t implement something in the fall of 2017 but we research it and have a plan, share the plan in the spring of 2018 to implement in the fall of 2018.  R. Dohoney – is seems that any of that would be budget neutral.  P. Dillon – I think so but I don’t full know yet.  The hard thing about all of this is there are two things going on.  There is reimagination to improve the quality of education and then to also see while we are doing that if there can’t be some savings.  In some places we think we will see savings and some will be neutral and some it may cost more but I am hoping that when is all said and done it is either balance across the board or net savings across the board.
  • Harrison – I wanted to follow up on the transportation. One of the other things we are doing differently or attempting to do differently this year, we are going out to bid and Southern Berkshire is also going to to bid for transportation.  One of their transportation providers is going out of business at the end of this year so we are looking to do a joint bid.  We have been trying to do it countywide, then we tried to do it south county, so we decided we would just start with the two of us.  I am working on that now.  I actually have it right here.  I am not sure it is going to save us money but I think it is a first step toward doing things collaboratively and we can shake things out and get more people involved the next time.  I just wanted to let you know.  R. Dohoney – how does that work if we go to this new model and they don’t.  S. Harrison – we are doing the bid specs, we are negotiating on what they have and what we have.  R. Dohoney – so all the kids are on the same buses in Southern Berkshire?  D. Weston – yes.  One of the times of having high school kids with young kids is really useful when you have an emergency.  If you have ever done a bus evacuation drill, you get a bunch of kids up to grade 4 and you open that back door and they just fall out.  When you have two or three upperclassmen on the bus and they are grabbing the kids, it is helpful.  Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire have had the same kind of bus accident where somebody has hit the bus, there were serious injury to the car but not to the kids on the bus and the bus driver is dealing with the emergency and there are older kids on the bus, it has worked out very well.  S. Harrison – What we will do, because there are already at Tier 1, what we do in a bus bid is we put in our current routes our current times, then we are going to have an alternate which will be for the one tier so they are going to bid on both the tier we has now and the alternate will be in there.  One large area that is different is they also have an escalator clause which I don’t believe will benefit us.  We are going to have a page in there that has an escalator clause just for Southern Berkshire.  Then we will be able to test because the numbers…we will have an apples to apples on the cost.  D. Weston – is there a requirement for the age of the bus and all that.  S. Harrison – yes.  P. Dillon – just from a timing perspective, the reimagination groups lost a day because of the snow day.  We are meeting this Monday.  The groups are meeting on their own, then in the new year we hope to come to wrap up our proposals and I think we will be sharing them initially in a Finance Subcommittee meeting on the 10th.  D. Weston – can you relay to the people that are working on that how much we appreciate the effort that are putting.  When you are talking about changing the job you do, who you work with, how you do your job, those are anxiety producing conversations and they cannot be easy.  P. Dillon – I am glad you said that, so a bunch of people here heard it and I will relay it and it is good that it is on the TV too.  D. Weston – we know that it is not easy.  R. Dohoney – also the fact that I hound you guys about the process, that process of the reimagination groups should be driven by itself and this budget and the next budget doesn’t have to be the deadline.  Get it right rather than do it fast.  P. Dillon – that is good to hear too.  On our worst days, some people think the reimagination process is a trojan horse for cuts and from my perspective it is very much not that and it is good to hear you say that.  S. Bannon – I think it is very similar to the shared services.  They can save money and they are good but it’s not…I think people have a misconception on both.  They are great and wonderful but it’s not going to solve all of our problems.  P. Dillon – organizations have an obligation to evolve, fine-tune, shift, and the depth and quality of the conversations in the whole group is really quite remarkable and I am glad people stepped up and are taking a leadership role.  For every meeting we have in those groups, those separate people are having conversations over lunch or after school or on their own time with their colleagues and that is important too.  S. Bannon – sometimes we get stagnant with too many mandates….P. Dillon – I think those conversations are always going on in the schools but this one of the rare times that it is going on across the schools.

PERSONNEL REPORT

• Non-Certified Appointment(s)
• Retirement(s) – Margie Kinne is retiring and she has worked for quite some time. Doren – I am deeply appreciative of what Margie has done for our community. She is a leader of the paras and in many ways a self-styled leader which is great.  She is really an amazing paraprofessional and has a historical understanding of what the district has gone through.  I have relied on her year in and year out for much and she has her finger on the pulse of the school.  She has been a trusted advisor and I would say she was instrumental in the hiring of our assistant principal and I am sad to see her go.  She has had a wonderful career with us.  She will be with us through the end of the year.
• Leave(s) of Absence
• Extra-Curricular Appointment(s)
• Dillon – the rest of the report is pretty straight forward. The stipends are in there.  You will notice a different level of mentors and that was intentional.  That is around how much support new teachers….R. Dohoney – this is just through the fiscal year, correct?  P. Dillon – yes.  There are some volunteer coaching things and those people make all the difference in the world and I am excited that we have such great volunteers particularly the swim got very big and it is nice that Tammy and Trish are there to help out because it is hard to coach 50 people in the pool at once.

BUSINESS OPERATION-None

EDUCATION NEWS- None

OLD BUSINESS- None

NEW BUSINESS- None

PUBLIC COMMENT- None

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION-None

Motion to Adjourn:   B. Fields                         Seconded:  D. Weston                               Approved:  Unanimous

Meeting Adjourned at 8:51pm

Submitted by:

Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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School Committee Secretary