Berkshire County — The vote whether or not the Berkshire Hills Regional School District will go forward with constructing a new high school building will take place in Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge on Tuesday, November 4.
Polls will be open in all three towns from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
According to a press release issued by School District Communications Coordinator Sheela Clary [Disclaimer: Clary is a columnist for The Berkshire Edge], polls in all three towns will be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. There will be two separate questions on two separate ballots.
According to Clary, the first question will appear as follows:
Do you approve of the vote of the Regional District School Committee of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, adopted on September 11, 2025, to authorize the borrowing of $152,067,064 to pay costs of designing, constructing, originally equipping and furnishing a new District high school to be located at 600 Stockbridge Road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, including the payment of all costs incidental or related thereto…
According to Clary, while the ballot question will include the total amount for the new high school building, $152,067,064, taxpayers in the three Berkshire Hills Regional School District towns are not being asked to pay the full amount. Clary writes in her press release that the Massachusetts School Building Association would be covering $61 million of the estimated total, and the state’s MassSave program would be contributing $1.6 million in energy incentives. According to Clary, the estimated total cost for the school building project to taxpayers is $89,457,399.
The second question, as per Clary, reads:
Shall the town of _______________ be allowed to exempt from the provision of proposition two and one-half, so-called, the amounts required to pay the Town’s allocable share of the bond issued by the Berkshire Hills Regional School District for the purpose of paying costs to replace the existing Monument Mountain Regional High School with a new facility serving students in grades 9-12 on the site of the existing school, including the payment of all costs incidental or related thereto?
If approved by voters in each town, this would create a town-specific debt exclusion that would allow for the funding of the high school building.
The school district’s quest to build a new high school building to replace the aging Monument Mountain Regional High School building started in December 2024, when members of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s Building Committee voted during that body’s meeting to pursue construction of the building.
The current Monument Mountain Regional High School building was constructed in 1966.
According to Superintendent of Schools Peter Dillion and School District Building Committee Chair Jason St. Peter, the district very much needs to replace the current aging building. “The current high school building is nearly 60 years old, and it is past its useful life,” Dillon told The Berkshire Edge. “We need to do something.”
According to the school district’s fiscal 2026 budget book, total school district enrollment has gone down from 1,201 students in 2021, to 1,150 students in 2025.
Several readers of The Berkshire Edge have sent Letters to the Editor with concerns about the upcoming high school building vote, including concerns about declining enrollment numbers.
In response, Dillon said he projects that the bulk of decreases in student enrollment “have happened already, and we see enrollment numbers having plateaued.” “We have a nice number with the School Building Authority of 485 high school students, which we believe will be the projected high school enrollment [when the building is completed],” Dillon explained. “We’re confident that this will be the enrollment number going forward.”
“The current high school building was built for over 700 students, and the new one we are proposing is meant for less than 500 students,” St. Peter added. “I think we’ve taken that into account not just by us, but also by the number crunchers at the state’s School Building Authority who are very concerned about how their money is spent. From their projections, it looks like that enrollment is going to be pretty much flatlined for the foreseeable future.”
Both Dillon and St. Peter said that while renovation of the current school building is possible, that option would not be financially optimal for the school district towns. “We had two independent cost estimators who looked at a renovation, and the cost of a renovation project compared to a new school building project is almost exactly the same,” Dillon said. “It would cost a little bit above $89 million if we take the existing high school building and repair it. If we pursued that project, we would not get any money from the state and we would end up with a slightly better version of a high school with what we have.”
Dillon said that any building renovation project would not address all the current problems with the building. “There would still be interior classrooms with no light, and the ceilings in the school’s automotive shops would still be too low to have cars go up on lifts,” Dillon said. “Any renovation plan would not address safety issues connected to having too many doors and windows in the building. A renovation plan would not address building accessibility issues in a meaningful way. Our classrooms in the building are undersized, particularly in our science and technology spaces.”
“We’re talking about roughly the same amount of money to upgrade the building, but we would not be adding anything new from an educational standpoint,” St. Peter added. “If we’re going to spend the money, one way or another, it would be much better bang for our tax dollars spending it on a new school. The current school building is at the end of its life cycle and does not serve the needs of our children.”
In response to critics arguing in their letters that a new school building project would substantially increase their property taxes, Dillon said “there’s some mixed messages there.”
“The same people that are saying property taxes are too high might be the same people who are saying that we should repair the current school building,” Dillon said. “Whether we do a repair to the current school building or build a new school, it’s still going to cost somewhere in the range of $89 million for any project. It makes sense to pursue the new school building project now at the current interest rates and values, and not defer it for another 10 years when the costs for any project would go up exponentially.
“I don’t see any way to educate these kids without spending a significant amount of money on either repairing what we have or building a new high school,” St. Peter added. “We’ve seen in the past how the prices have increased. Anyone you talk to, either an architect or a builder, no one is predicting that building prices are going to go down in the future. The odds are that prices are going to continue to rise. The longer that the school district waits to do anything, the higher the price tag is going to be for any project. We need to do something.”
St. Peter said that if voters approve the new school building project, the plan for the school district would be to have the building ready by the 2029–30 school year.
Editor’s note: Article updated with polling locations and times for all three towns.
