Great Barrington — Lamenting poor turnout at meetings, Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon once said that when the committee proposes budget cuts that affect students, people will come.
And come they did.
Faced with possible teaching and programming cuts amounting to nearly $250,000 in savings — including the lay off of a popular high school art teacher and the shut down of the Early Kindergarten program — the community Thursday night (February 26) packed Monument Valley Regional Middle School’s cafeteria for a public hearing on the Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s 2016 budget, and pleaded for a restoration of the cuts, along with future planning and action to avoid such crises in the future.
Close to two dozen former and current students, parents, teachers, school staff and town officials — and even outspoken critics of the district — addressed the school committee with mostly passionate pleas to reconsider such cuts to a $24 million capital and operating budget with an increase of roughly $860,000 caused by what the committee says are mostly unavoidable expenses due to rises in insurance rates, salaries and benefits, utilities and transportation costs.
The budget, which is still dependent on the March 4 release of the state’s budget, was admittedly fashioned, say committee members, to keep Great Barrington’s assessment from rising above 5 percent, so its taxpayers would not grow downright militant. Before the cuts were proposed, Great Barrington’s rate would be up 7 percent.
Passions were fierce: Monument High student journalist Jacob Robbins had helped collect over 200 signatures to save the beloved art teacher, Krista Kennedy, from losing her job. “People feel safe and loved inside her classroom,” which he described as a “sanctuary” for many students. Also, he said, “we are concerned this [cut] will further exacerbate schisms between youth and the higher authority.”
The artist Simon Ban, a former Monument art student and Pratt graduate, even traveled from Brooklyn to protest a cut to the art department, a place where he found “solace,” he said, and received “the best therapy I ever got.”
Monument High Art teacher Neel Webber said the art department was about much more than teaching art. “This is a central focal point for our school community and our school culture, which significantly reflects our local community,” and added that art draws business and tourism to the area, affecting our “quality of life.” He said he thought allowing school choice students on the waiting for the high school, for a three-year period, would increase revenue without costing the school anything.
And Monument High guidance counselor Sean Flynn invoked the broader theme of the overall culture in the community and schools, and “the conscious choice we made to stay here or come back here to raise our families, specifically in this school district, knowing that the quality of education…is going to be as top notch as you’re going to find. With that comes a responsibility to pay for it.”
And Krista Kennedy, who, if she loses her teaching position, will be installed at Muddy Brook Elementary School, where she will replace another art teacher, Alexandra Benton. “I want you to realize the cascading effects of me getting bumped,” she said.
Bill Cooke, who recently announced his candidacy for an opening on the Great Barrington Selectboard, said the cuts will harm education but not “make a difference with voters [at Town Meeting].”
“It’s less than two percent,” he added. “Just keep it.”
“Costs go up every year,” said Great Barrington Selectboard member Ed Abrahams. “It’s not realistic for taxpayers to expect that taxes won’t also go up.” He knows taxes are high, he said, “but who should pay these extra costs? Should it be the taxpayers…with dollars, or should it be the students of our district, with a poorer education?”
“I’m not rich,” said Debbie Brazie, speaking on behalf, she said, of her new grandchild’s educational future. “But I will find a way to pay for this [increase]…I will get another job if I have to.” Brazie said she had been listening over the last 18 years as she recorded school committee meeting minutes and recalls many a conversation about the importance of early childhood education, and the district’s “conscious decision to have Early Kindergarten,” and other programs. “We might lose savings,” she noted, if those children choice out of the district and into another, which costs the district around $5,000 per student.
“What concerns me is the message we send when cutting our youngest learners,” said Muddy Brook Elementary kindergarten teacher Jack Curletti. “Learning from birth to age five is critical,” especially now, he added, when the number of children qualifying for free lunches is growing.
Even critics of the district, who grew strident during and after last fall’s disquieting and tumultuous battle over the proposed renovation of Monument Mountain Regional High School, said the cuts should be restored to the budget.
“I simply can’t support this type of cutting,” said Karen Christensen, who co-founded GB21 with other Castle Hill residents who also want to see changes in the operation of the district. She said the district should not assume that all costs will go up. She asked the committee to consider more sustainable “creative” financial planning. The cuts to programming, she said, “appeals to the emotion…it seems manipulative.”
Finance Committee Chair and GB21 co-founder Sharon Gregory, who has been trying to slide the district’s finances under her committee’s microscope, said that the proposed cuts should be restored, but wanted to see movement with sharing services and consolidation, with “stated milestones that cover the next three to five years.”
“The budget will continue to increase at about the same rate in the face of a declining population,” she added.
Michelle Loubert of Housatonic, a Monument High graduate, didn’t like the cuts either. But before she votes on the budget at Town Meeting, she said she wants to see evidence of any analysis made to cut administrators instead of teachers and programs. Like Loubert, Selectboard member Dan Bailly — who is opposed to the cuts — wondered: “If the total of salaries at the administration level — excluding secretarial — is about $1.2 million — if they all took a 7 percent pay cut…that saves the Early Kindergarten program or art teacher.” He also suggested possibly removing the vice principal position from Muddy Brook Elementary, since it was relatively new.
“This is a political decision,” Stockbridge Selectboard member Chuck Gillett said of the cuts.
It was true, admitted committee members Richard Dohoney and Dan Weston, who are both on the finance sub-committee, saying the unpopular decision — even among themselves — was “a response to pressure on the school committee,” as Weston put it, to ease some of Great Barrington’s tax pain.
After proposing the cuts, Weston said, he “had buyer’s regret.”
Dohoney said it was “terrible” that the committee had to be put in the position of having to mostly consider the effect on Great Barrington. He called it a “dishonest” approach to the decision making process. But, he said, “I believed [the cuts] were necessary evils.”
Dohoney firmly shot down the idea that administrators are somehow awash in high pay at the expense of teachers or taxpayers. “The silent cut in this budget is that administrators who now have grown to be underpaid in the market are not getting well deserved salary increases,” he said.
As for staffing, Dohoney said one could see it was “skeletal” by “walking through district offices [midday]…and doing the same thing at Town Hall in Great Barrington, and counting heads…this [district] is a bigger financial organization, more regulated, with a more challenging mission than the town, and the level of staffing is shockingly different.”
“If the residents of Great Barrington want to relieve their tax burden by cutting administrative expenses, they can do it at the town level, because it’s easier to do it there.”
On Dohoney’s last point, committee member Bill Fields, who is also on the finance sub-committee, was scathing, and it was clear that there was finally a large enough audience, and perhaps some traction, for the committee to fight back after a year of sharp criticism.
“Our budget is 51 percent, the town’s…is 49 percent…what is the town of Great Barrington doing with regard to its economics? I don’t see anyone in the town saying, ‘do we really need 17 policemen, with a decreasing population in the town?’ Why aren’t we looking at a regional police department…or fire department? Why aren’t we contracting out plowing?” He also wondered why Finance Committee member Michael Wise’s tax reform ideas aren’t being discussed anymore. “I see everybody coming to Berkshire Hills saying ‘change your way of doing business.’ ”
“Someone said the school is the favorite punching bag of the town,” he said. “Well that’s got to stop sometimes…the school committee is trying to juggle three balls: school choice, the equity arrangement…and the consolidation issue.”
“I’m just getting this off my chest,” he added.
And Dan Weston railed against the fecund innuendo against the district, generated during the high school renovation wars last fall, a strategy possibly designed to foment continued distrust in the schools and open the door for voters to flay the school budget at May 4 Town Meeting, as was attempted last year.
“I am tired of being the punching bag” Weston said, “and I am tired of general, vague suggestions… that are almost like sound bites, and they post things on the web that are inaccurate…you can suggest that we’re hiding funds or that there’s a secret agenda…we don’t have the option of being vague, we don’t have the option of the sound bites…we have to make a real budget.”
He said strategic planning was a challenge in Massachusetts, unlike some other states, where multi-year budgets can be crafted. “A big part of strategic planning is budget, but we can’t budget for more than one year.”
Dohoney, however, said he was uncomfortable with several capital projects in the budget, like repairs to the high school track, which is already a year older than its 8 to 10 year lifespan. He wondered if there was another way to generate revenue from the community and other schools who use the track, or perhaps use Community Preservation Act funds to pay for repairs.
This raised Fields’ ire once again. He thinks the capital budget should be higher, he said. Fields has recently expressed frustration over the lack of timely repairs to the 48-year-old high school. “I’m tired of fiddling and diddling with the building…we could be guilty of kicking the can down road.”
That “can” is the deferred maintenance that has beleaguered both Great Barrington and Monument High over many years, and which has, in part, made the town’s taxes rise dramatically over the past 10 years due to the renovation or replacement some of the town’s infrastructure. Ironically, it was the fear of tax hikes that prevented timely management in the past. So when the $51 million high school renovation project came around for a vote, Great Barrington taxpayers said they couldn’t shoulder it, even their $19 million share of the price tag.
Committee member Christine Shelton said that cuts should be made “farthest away from the kids.” Undaunted, she said Great Barrington should be presented with a budget that keeps programming intact. “I don’t think we should run scared from voters now just because of the renovation vote.”
Finance Committee member Leigh Davis had made the same point earlier: “Trust the democratic process, and let the town decide.”
To watch the hearing, go to, CTSBTV: https://www.ctsbtv.org/iframe-2/
BHRSD’s proposed budget can be found here: https://www.bhrsd.org
