Great Barrington — A group of residents, calling themselves the “Green Tea Party,” and who say they are organizing a push for economic and community vitality, are taking a controversial position on the Berkshire Hills Regional School District budget ahead of Monday’s Annual Town Meeting, encouraging residents to vote down the town’s share of the district’s $25 million budget as a “symbolic” gesture that they say will pressure Stockbridge and West Stockbridge into changing an “unfair” 50-year-old district agreement that is placing an increasingly unsustainable burden on Great Barrington taxpayers.
Great Barrington currently pays 52 percent of the entire school budget, and 70 percent of what the three towns owe. This year Great Barrington’s share is $14.5 million, a 7 percent or $938,000 increase from last year.
The Green Tea Party (GTP) is an outgrowth of the Save Searles group that was dedicated to seeing the former Searles High School on Bridge Street historically preserved, or tastefully and thoughtfully renovated. On the heels of that first success, the group’s tireless members have cast themselves out into a variety of local issues they say are key to a thriving town.
“We’re not just having coffee or being armchair people,” said Gabrielle Senza, one of the group’s spokespeople. “We’re reaching out to officials, fully educating ourselves.”
Senza, along with members Bobby Houston and Ron Blumenthal, both developers in Great Barrington, spoke to The Edge Monday (April 2) before a Selectboard meeting in which the group’s school budget position drew a heated response from visibly angry board member Ed Abrahams, who said it was voting against education.
But Senza told the board she nor anyone she knew was against education, but rather against the town paying the bulk of school costs, while Stockbridge and West Stockbridge each pay roughly 15 percent in a per-student formula that charges per head. It’s based on property values, Senza noted, $10.43 per every thousand dollars of the assessed value of a property in Great Barrington, leaving Stockbridge to pay $3.57 for every thousand.
“The way district is funded is not fair,” Senza said, squeezing down the ratio. “We’re paying $10 for this pizza and they’re paying $3.25 for the pizza…Great Barrington tax payers are about to revolt.”
As set up in the three-town Regional Agreement, and confirmed in an email obtained by The Edge, Department of Education (DOE) Governance Manager Christine Lynch said the school budget can be approved even if one town votes it down. If two out of the three vote it down, that’s another story, and three town meetings will have to be reconvened to settle it. And if not settled by July 1, the district will only get one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget on a interim, monthly basis. And if the budget is still unapproved by the towns as of December 1 of that year, “the Commissioner [of Education] will assume fiscal control…and will establish the final budget for the year.”
The town of West Stockbridge on Monday already approved the school budget at its Annual Town Meeting.
So, Senza said, if Great Barrington were to make that “symbolic” gesture to protest the financial arrangement during what the Green Tea Party says is an apparent stall in the process of revising the three-town district agreement, “the sky won’t fall…it’s a safe position to take…to say to the other towns, enough is enough. Great Barrington isn’t going to continue kicking this can down the road.”
It all started in 2014, after a second proposal to renovate 50-year-old Monument Mountain Regional High School was voted down by Great Barrington taxpayers, mainly over this very funding issue. The state’s school building authority was to give the district almost half the $53 million cost to renovate the school, and the vote pushed the school to the back of the long queue of public schools that need help. The high school is in bad shape, everyone agrees, and GTP says the school won’t get overhauled unless the funding pie gets divided more equally, echoing what renovation opponents were saying back in 2014.
The renovation crisis gave birth to a number of new strategies by the district to save money, including Berkshire Hills’ Superintendent Peter Dillon recently being hired by the Shaker Mountain School Union as a way a way to share services. Another was to create RAAC (Regional Agreement Amendment Committee), composed of representatives of all three towns, with guidance from the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS). The most recent meeting was cantankerous, and it became clear that Stockbridge and West Stockbridge would not budge on making changes to the way the agreement is set up.
“If you’ve been following the fireworks at RAAC, you know it’s not going well,” GTP’s Houston told the Selectboard. He thanked Chair Sean Stanton and member Dan Bailly for casting votes against the school budget, though in the board’s budget vote, they were two out of five.
“The school tax situation here is broken, and at the committee to fix it, it was dead on arrival,” GTP’s Blumenthal said, adding that it was time to bring in some “neutral” experts on this sort of complex funding issue.
RAAC isn’t the only place flames have erupted. The Support the BHRSD Budget Facebook page is smoking with posts from school budget supporters and GTP members. Supporters are trying to explain that the district is in a squeeze from increasing insurance costs and reduced state aid; while GTP members are saying indeed that is the case, but still, the pie is unfairly divided between towns and should be recut. The group is urging parents and others to show up at Town Meeting in droves and knock back GTP’s protest effort.
Back at Monday’s Selectboard meeting, former Finance Committee Chair Sharon Gregory said “because of its demographics, Great Barrington suffers a lot more than most [towns].” She said charging per student “goes against everything we know about public education,” and instead treats it more as “tuition based” rather than equally shared, and is one factor impeding economic development in town. “We’re really going to be destroying the town that we want to build,” she added, saying a protest vote is also meant to get the attention of state legislators.
The Edge asked state Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox) what the state could do about this pickle. He said while a no vote on the budget might “raise awareness, and is symbolic…there’s still no progress.” He said the Undersecretary of Education came to the Berkshires in 2006 and said that the state had failed to deal with how to properly fund regional schools. Pignatelli has himself been key in working closely with local school districts to brainstorm how to share services.
“The state won’t impose a formula,” he said, adding that the “local level” is where the deepest conversations and changes can take place. He said this is a tough one: “ ‘I want to pay less and the only way I can do that is for you to pay more,’ ” he said of the RAAC negotiations. “What partnership would want to do that?”
Pignatelli noted that second homeowners make up about 70 percent of Stockbridge’s population, and there are “fewer and fewer kids” in the town.
While many feel a no vote at Town Meeting will simply send a message, others are concerned it’s playing with fire, given the rise of school costs and cost control measures that nearly wiped out some programming these last two years, but was saved by community outrage and other budget adjustments.
Selectboard member and School Committee Chair Steve Bannon has been an advocate for the three towns working together to come up with a solution to the funding issue. But he expressed concern Monday night about what could happen if the school ended up in “state receivership,” though highly unlikely this year. He agreed with Senza that if Great Barrington said no, “it’s not the end of the world.”
“I’ve never called anybody anti-school no matter how they vote or don’t vote,” he said, adding that voting it down “is a big deal symbolically…Great Barrington has never voted down a [school] budget.”
Later, he told The Edge it may cost the town between $3,000 and $5,000 to hold another Town Meeting in the event the budget has to be brought back for a vote this year.
But it was Ed Abrahams who expressed outrage on the principal of such a symbolic vote. “In what universe is voting against the budget not voting against education?” he said. He warned that if by chance two towns were to vote down the budget, reverting the budget to the previous year’s budget, it could spell disaster for students since costs always go up.
But for GTP, and some Great Barrington members of RAAC, along with others in town, the situation, particularly the lack of movement with RAAC, is intolerable.
Senza referred to RAAC member Chip Elitzer’s computation that over the last 50 years “Great Barrington provided a $90 million subsidy to Stockbridge” for school costs. “This year it’s increasing by $3 million,” she added. Elitzer had come up with a new funding plan that was rejected outright by RAAC, one that would charge each town by its total assessed value of property rather than the current per pupil allocation, stretching out the increases to the other towns so that all three would pay exactly the same at the end of a 20-year span.
Elitzer and others who support an overhaul of the agreement say that while education funding economics are complicated, this idea is simple: someone on one side of the Stockbridge/Great Barrington property line should not be paying more than someone on the other side, no matter how many kids are involved.
And Stockbridge RAAC representative Frederic Rutberg sees it differently, for instance. At the last meeting he said attempts to help Great Barrington to its “satisfaction” will hurt the other towns.
GTP told The Edge they will move for a secret ballot at Town Meeting, for which they need only 20 supporters at the meeting. A secret ballot, rather than the usual display of hands, will prevent bullying by those who want to see it passed, Senza said. “We’re not against education but bad legislation,” she added.
And Housatonic resident Michelle Loubert took it one further, telling the board what she had heard at the RAAC meetings. “Representatives from the Town of Stockbridge said no, no no, no no. As far as I’m concerned they’re the ones not supporting education.”
Monday’s Great Barrington Selectboard meeting can be viewed on CTSB-TV. Annual Town Meeting will be held at Monument Mountain Regional High School on Monday May 9, 6 p.m.
