STOCKBRIDGE — A third application to the state for funding for a new Monument Mountain Regional High School will contain more aggressive language in an effort to draw attention to the poor condition of the building.
That much was clear after the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee’s meeting on May 20, when members questioned Superintendent Peter Dillon and Director of Operations Steven Soule on a draft statement of interest to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), the quasi-independent authority that helps school districts fund capital improvement projects.
Dillon presented the 20-page draft (click here to read it) in the hope it could be revised quickly and sent to the MSBA. But it became clear that some members thought the language was not aggressive enough and did not paint a sufficiently dire picture of the state of the 53-year-old high school’s condition.
See video below of the May 20 meeting of the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee. Fast forward to 28:20 for the discussion of the strategy of communicating Monument’s needs to state authorities:
Committee member Bill Fields of Great Barrington pointed to the school’s Career/Vocational Technical Education (CVTE) program, whose facilities, including the greenhouse, the nursery program, and the auto facility, he called “alarming.” Fields objected to language in the statement of interest that merely termed the CVTE facilities as “inadequate” and problems as “facilities constraints.”
“No, they are not inadequate. They’re abysmal,” Fields said. “I think we need more active language that says that the CVTE program, as it now stands, is in dire jeopardy of nonviability because we cannot do what we say we want to do.”
Of the exterior greenhouse, Fields called it “a walking time bomb” and termed it “unbelievably obsolete.” Furthermore, the condition of the greenhouse “hurts our Chapter 74 horticulture program,” Fields added, referring to state laws governing vocational and technical programs.
But Soule cautioned against painting too dire a picture for the state: “We also need to make sure they know we are taking care of the asset.” Chairman Steve Bannon further theorized that a dismal description of the facilities might convince the state that its funds could be wasted.
Committee member Rich Dohoney, also of Great Barrington, asked Dillon and Soule to emphasize the extent to which Berkshire Hills serves more than the three towns that formally comprise the district, including the town of Richmond and the Farmington River Regional School District, which serves Otis and Sandisfield for grades K-6. Neither school district has a high school of its own, so they send those students to Berkshire Hills on a tuition basis.
“We serve twice as many towns in the high school than we have in the district,” Dohoney said. “We serve a massive geographic area, which is important. This high school is very valuable to a huge geographical swath. I think our tuition agreement with the other towns would be important to the state.”
Dillon thanked members of the committee for their suggestions and said he and Soule had been rewriting the document for weeks “in response to specific technical questions” and acknowledged that reviewing the same document for an extended period of time can make officials weary.
“Steve and I were not seeing it with the freshest eyes,” Dillon explained. “You are going to see things that we are not seeing anymore.”
This will be the third try since 2013 to get state aid for the 1960s-era high school. Within the span of one year, a pair of $50-million-plus proposals failed when Great Barrington, by far the largest of the three towns in the district, twice failed to approve an override to Proposition 2½, a state statute that limits tax levy increases. In both cases, the state would have paid for nearly 41 percent of the cost, not counting incentives that would have raised the state’s share closer to half.
In the last few months, members of the committee have been increasingly sympathetic to the so-called dual-track approach of trying one more time to obtain state funding, while also pursuing a path toward self-funding a new high school if the MSBA declines to offer funding again. Dillon outlined the process here. It includes the hiring of a consultant who has experience with both tracks.
“We’re not putting our eggs all in one basket,” Bannon told his colleagues. “We’re going to keep moving on this immediately so that if we’re turned down or not accepted, we have still made a lot of progress before that.”
The deadline for submitting the SOI to the state for the next round of funding is June 25, so Dillon and Soule will revise the document and bring it to the school committee for a likely vote at the June 2 meeting.
It remains unclear what the total cost of the project would be. The first failed proposal put before voters in 2013 was pegged at $56 million. A slimmed down proposal that would have cost $51 million failed one year later. Both proposals passed in Stockbridge and West Stockbridge, but those two towns were effectively vetoed by tax-weary Great Barrington voters.
Former Great Barrington selectman Dan Bailly, who is a building contractor by training, told the school committee last month that construction supply costs have doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic, so any high school construction project this time around would be considerably more expensive.
But the cost of the project could be softened considerably. In 2005, Berkshire Hills opened new regional elementary and middle schools on Monument Valley Road near the high school on Route 7. But in order to build Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School and W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School, the district had to issue bonds to complete the $29 million project.
Those bonds are scheduled to be paid off in 2024, Berkshire Hills business administrator Sharon Harrison has said. So if the debt for the two schools is retired at about the same time that the new debt is assumed for the Monument project, it would blunt the effect of the tax increases necessary to finance it.
