Berkshire County — During the Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board meeting on Wednesday, September 28, the board briefly reviewed a draft regional agreement. The draft regional agreement covers various aspects of what a potential merger of Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire Regional School districts would look like.
At the September 28 meeting, Project Manager Jake Eberwein emphasized that the regional agreement is still a work in progress. “During the last fiscal year we contracted with the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools to help us do some context setting work,” Eberwein said. “That work included advising us on parts of a regional agreement, along with ways to order elements of the agreement with specific attention to assessment, methodology, and governance. They talked us through needed documentation for the agreement and what the Department of Education process was for approving [elements of an agreement].”
Eberwein said that the association delivered to the committee what he called a boilerplate draft agreement, but that the committee would have to determine several elements. Many of the sections in the draft are marked “TBD,” including the total number of members that would represent each town on a district school committee, the development of an intra-school choice policy, policies on school repairs and potential closures, minimum operating costs, along with the apportionment of capital and debt costs.
The name on the front of the draft regional school agreement is “Southern Berkshire Hills’ Regional School District,” with the note “this working name of a new regional district is TBD” with the date of the agreement listed as July 1, 2024, on the front page. “If the eight towns were to partner on the construction of a new high school, then [a section on] capital would be potentially needed somewhere down the road when buildings that are then operated by a new single district would need capital investments,” Eberwein said. “You have to think about capital in a couple of different ways.”
Attorney Russell Dupere, of the law firm Dupere Law Offices of Westfield, has been hired by the board for legal work on the agreement. “A lot of the language of a regional agreement is something that we can tweak, but the gist of each section needs to be included in the agreement for a variety of reasons,” Dupere said. “The real heavy lifting for a group like yours is the certain sections of the regional agreement that are subject to change. The draft document includes different options that are available under different sections that can be reviewed by a committee such as this one.”
Members of the board discussed how many members total the district school committee should have, and how many members should be from each town. There were several membership options detailed in a worksheet included with the draft agreement.
Berkshire Hills Regional School District Superintendent Peter Dillon said that he favors a membership option that would give Great Barrington three members, Sheffield two members, and one member from each of the remaining member towns. “I think [a committee] that would have anything more than 12 or 13 members would get too challenging,” Dillon said. “One of the superintendent’s jobs is to try to connect with members individually. If it starts becoming like a football team instead of a baseball team in size, it gets overwhelming.”
The next regular meeting scheduled for the Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board, as listed on its website, is on Tuesday, October 25. In the meantime, several subcommittee meetings are scheduled throughout the month.
Click here for the draft district agreement as presented at the September 28 meeting in PDF format.
