Great Barrington — While discussions and studies are going forward with the potential merger of Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire regional school districts, members of the Eight Town Regional School District’s Planning Board seem to be frustrated with a lack of input from both the public and staff members of the school districts.
The lack of feedback was the main topic of discussion at the board’s Outreach Subcommittee meeting on Friday, September 23. At the beginning of the meeting, Project Manager Jake Eberwein spoke about a lack of responses to a SurveyMonkey survey from staff members of the two school districts. “We received up to 27 or so replies, and of those 15 believed that a small group followup [to the survey] made sense,” Eberwein said. “I think we should call it done at this point. I’m not sure how many times we can send it out. It’s not a great response, but it’s something.”
“There is a real survey fatigue,” Berkshire Hills Regional School District Superintendent Peter Dillon said. “As a district, we’re trying to limit the number of surveys people are doing. Some staff members are getting over two surveys a week, and it’s crazy. I don’t know how to manage all of that.”
Eberwein said that he would work with Dillon and Southern Berkshire Regional School District Superintendent Beth Regulbuto to identify people who would serve on any possible steering committees. “I don’t know how else we’re going to get people on these committees,” Dillon said. “I think SurveyMonkey said that it would take two minutes and 45 seconds to finish, so it wasn’t a particularly long survey. But I do understand that teachers get a lot of email traffic. At this point we can say that we asked, so now we can tap people on the shoulder [to serve on the committees] if we want. We won’t accept the fact that people will say ‘I wasn’t included’ because everyone had a chance to weigh in and to participate, so now we move on.”
Members of the board also talked about the future of community forums about the potential merger. “This is sort of a struggle for me,” Chairman Lucy Prashker said. “We do these outreach meetings and don’t get a lot of attendance. I am willing to keep doing it, but I don’t know how effective it is. I’m wondering if we can partner with the select boards in the eight towns and ask them to help us identify a forum in the town and maybe promote public attendance?”
The board proceeded to discuss a video in the works that will promote the idea of the potential merger and will serve as a form of community outreach. Eberwein said that the video was still being worked on at the time of the meeting. “A video would be the biggest opportunity to capture the most people,” committee member Nadine Hawver said. “I did a forum not too long ago because Sheffield is writing a housing production plan. We had a forum and we only had a handful of people at the meeting. People want housing, but they don’t want to show up to help us with it. I hate to keep wasting your time, Lucy, and have a low turnout. I think we have to go bigger.”
The committee also discussed running advertisements in the area Southern Berkshire Shoppers Guide that would consist of committee updates, but no decision was made by the board. “We might get a response, but then again it still might be the same old sleepy group,” Hawver said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do when somebody says that we haven’t done enough community outreach, aside from going into their homes and dragging them by the earlobe.”
After the meeting, outreach consultant Mary Nash sent an update of the committee’s work during this past month to The Berkshire Edge. In the update, the committee reports that it is concentrating on educational visioning, including considering options for the delivery of educational programming, creating opportunities for members of the two districts to learn about each other, and “building a shared sense of ownership in creating an educational vision” for the region.
The visioning will be organized by the membership of grade groups, including pre-kindergarten to 4th grade, 5th to 8th grade, and 9th through 12th grade, along with a group for vocational and career pathways programs.
The update did not list meeting times for these groups or how long the visioning process would take.
