Great Barrington — Generally, when a campaign fails—be it a political campaign or fundraising effort—a post-mortem is done and officials involved in the ill-fated effort go about the often grim task of re-examining the process in order to do better next time.
Such was the case more than 10 years ago when a pair of ballot questions on fixing Monument Mountain Regional High School failed in successive years. Both proposals, calling for extensive renovations and an addition totalling more than $50 million, were decisively rejected by voters in Great Barrington, by far the largest town in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District.
A second, slightly less expensive proposal failed the following November by approximately the same margin. Berkshire Hills officials and many parents, students, and employees of the district were dejected. They were determined to spend the next several years plotting a comeback. They vowed to do better and to avoid making the same mistakes.
The result was a resounding victory last month, with 78 percent of voters in all three towns approving a brand-new high school at considerably greater cost. In multiple Berkshire Edge interviews, school district officials and advocates for the project tell the story of recovering from defeat and winning against the odds.
Size of win “shocking”
“I was absolutely shocked,” said Steve Bannon, who has chaired the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee since the late 1990s. “I thought there was a chance it would have passed. I would have been happy with 51–49, but I would have not bet a dollar on 78 percent.”
“I can’t think of a time when 78 percent of anybody agreed to anything,” added Peter Dillon, who has served as the district’s superintendent since 2009. “I think even if I was ordering pizza for my family, we couldn’t agree at that rate.”
I first came to the Berkshires to work as an editor and reporter at the now-defunct Berkshire Record in November 2013, about two weeks after the proposed $56 million renovation project had failed.
I recalled at that time that it was not an easy task to get school officials to talk on the record about their failures—especially to an unfamiliar face. We are reminded of a proverb popularized by President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion: “Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.”
Shortly after the first defeat, I recall attending a meeting of the Great Barrington Selectboard at the fire station where Dillon, then in only his fourth year as superintendent of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, told the board the district was likely to try again next year but that he felt it was best that he not spearhead the effort.
A second attempt
So the voluble local activist Karen Smith was appointed the public face of the second go-around, holding information sessions and touring the three towns in the regional school district: Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge.
Alan Chartock, the now-retired CEO of Northeast Public Radio and WAMC, subsequently got involved, arguing in a pair of Berkshire Eagle columns that opponents of the slimmed-down $51.2 million project were “un-American” and “selfish.” As I learned at the time, Chartock’s comments did not sit well with the thousands of voters who were skeptical or on the fence about the proposal in the first place.
“Searing defeat”
The result of the second effort in 2014 was much the same as the first. In what then-Berkshire Edge reporter Heather Bellow called a “searing defeat,” both Stockbridge and West Stockbridge approved the ballot questions by healthy margins, but weary Barringtonians, many of whom felt unfairly saddled with a disproportionate school-tax burden to begin with, rejected both the question of approving the school district’s bonding for the project as well as a Proposition 2½ override that would have allowed the district to exceed tax levy limits necessitated by the resulting debt.
Since the debt-exclusion vote had to be approved separately by all three towns, the entire proposal failed once again. The state had offered to pay for $23.2 million of the project, or nearly half.
That left the district and its school committee in a state of soul searching. School officials knew something had to be done about the 1960s-era structure built on the cheap nearly 60 years ago with $3 million funded entirely with local dollars. The weather-beaten high school, with its outdated infrastructure, poor security, and interior classrooms without windows, stood in stark contrast to the nearly new elementary and middle schools completed just down the road in 2005.
Merger with Southern Berkshire Regional School District rejected
After the 2014 loss, the school committee regrouped and formed a committee, Next Steps, to explore the district’s options after the pair of defeats. The new panel flirted with the idea of adding a fourth town to the district, in part to increase the percentage of state aid for a new project.
A panel was subsequently formed to mount a serious effort to merge Berkshire Hills with the Southern Berkshire Regional School District in Sheffield. After months of research and deliberation, the Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board voted to explore the merger and, finally, to recommend it to voters. But taxpayers in all but one of the five towns in Southern Berkshire rejected it in October 2023.
Some voters in those towns cited concerns that Berkshire Hills officials were motivated only by a desire to shore up sagging enrollments and to add more towns to share the costs of building a new Monument Mountain Regional High School.
So Next Steps ramped up its efforts not long after the merger was rejected. A separate advocacy group independent of the school committee, Yes Monument, was formed to lobby the public for support. The factors accounting for the success are open to debate, but key players interviewed by The Edge shared their thoughts about how this project managed to succeed where others had failed.
Responding to previous concerns
Dillon cited the district’s responsiveness to resistance about previous proposals. Specifically, through a revision in the district agreement, voters in all three towns in 2016 approved a change in the way individual towns’ tax burdens are calculated for capital projects, thus lessening the tax burden on Great Barrington for a new high school. Great Barrington’s share of a new high school project dropped from 74 percent to 52 percent, while Stockbridge’s more than doubled to 32 percent and West Stockbridge’s percentage remained about the same.
“The people of Stockbridge voted against their own economic interest to increase their share to make it more likely Great Barrington would embrace it,” Dillon said.
The new high school will also host expanded vocational education programs, which are becoming increasingly popular. Ten years ago, Monument had room for only two state-approved Chapter 74 vocational programs: automotive and horticulture. “In the interim, we got early childhood and electricity,” Dillon explained. “There is something really compelling about supporting the trades in addition to our traditionally strong academic work. In the trades, most kids graduate and work and live in the community. That’s not as true for kids in academic programs.”
Bannon also had high praise for the design team, including architect Donna DiNisco of DiNisco Design, in collaboration with William Rawn Associates. “It’s a beautiful plan,” Bannon said. “They talked to everyone to make sure everyone in the organization was happy.”
The new school will be built on a practice athletic field in front of the old school on Stockbridge Road (Route 7) and is expected to open in fall 2029. It will cost a maximum of $152 million, with a $61 million reimbursement from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). The old high school will be demolished shortly after the new one opens.
Rising prices
Bannon explained that a number of other factors came into play. Prices rose sharply after the pandemic, which caused taxpayers to realize that a solution to the old school would be far more costly down the road. In addition, Bannon said he had personally spoken with several parents and other district residents who voted against the previous proposals but told him they were voting in favor this time. “We had a much more enthusiastic response from parents of younger children,” he explained. “The timing was good; everything fell into place.”
Some skeptics of the plan had complained that the district had accumulated too much deferred maintenance on the building and that a renovation of the sort previously rejected in 2013 and 2014 was preferable. But district officials countered that the building underwent regular maintenance, including very expensive items like the roof and boilers, and that the difference in price to taxpayers between a renovation and a new school was minimal after state aid was factored in.
Compounding the public-relations problem was the fact that the high school’s enrollment has declined significantly, dropping from around 700 students in 1999 to 431 in 2024-25.
The district has been hosting public school choice students from surrounding towns for decades, but the tuition paid by sending districts is shockingly low and has remained unchanged at about $5,000 since public school choice was approved by the state legislature in 1993. Interestingly, in an act of good faith, Bannon told The Berkshire Edge a group of school-choice parents had raised money for the Yes Monument committee.
Furthermore, a renovation of the existing building would have been extremely disruptive, necessitating elaborate dust-control measures and the rental of perhaps dozens of temporary trailer-style classrooms. And the MSBA reimbursement for the renovation would have been far less than the $61 million the state is providing for a completely new and separate school.
Surprised at MSBA’s embrace
Speaking of the MSBA, Dillon and Bannon were surprised that the authority even agreed to help fund the new project after the history of rejection the district had experienced during the last two unsuccessful attempts.
Dillon credited that to the longevity of district officials, including himself and Bannon, who has chaired the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee since 1997 and has worked with four superintendents: Linda Day, Danny Brown, Donna Moyer, and Dillon. “Superintendents come and go, but I’ve been here 17 years and have been pushing on these particular things,” Dillon said. “It’s 17 years of building relationships with the MSBA. It’s also deep relationships and trust within the community, and I think that helped a lot.”
“Focused” PR effort
District residents Ellen Lahr and Rebecca Gold were the co-chairs of Yes Monument, an independent group that launched an advocacy website and were active on social media. They distributed close to 800 lawn signs and held dozens of informational meetings. Retired Monument art teacher Neel Webber acted as the social media monitor.
“We had a really good comms team and a focus which was very fact-based,” said Lahr. “We managed to boil things down very well. The messaging was really good. Everyone was more focused this time around.”
Lahr, a public relations specialist and former business reporter at The Berkshire Eagle, noted that “social media has evolved in the last 10 years” and that Facebook was “pretty much a free-for-all” during the first two go-arounds. She said Yes Monument’s team, including Webber, treated all commenters on its Facebook and Instagram pages with respect.
Social media posts included not only information about the project but video presentations featuring testimonials supporting the new school from past and current students, along with faculty and coaches. In addition, email updates were popular and available. Also included was a “virtual tour” of what the new high school will look like:
Tax concerns addressed
A tax-impact calculator was made available so that taxpayers could see how much they would have to pay on an annual basis to support the project. That number was lower than many expected because the school committee decided to issue 30-year bonds instead of a 20-year bond. Further reducing the tax impact was the fact that the $16 million in bonds issued for the construction of DuBois Middle School and Muddy Brook Elementary School in 2005 had been recently paid off.
Gold, an advertising copywriter by profession, worked closely with Lahr to craft a compelling but relatively simple message combining voter turnout and addressing every objection no-voters had 11 and 12 years ago. “A lot of people just weren’t aware of [the upcoming vote],” Gold told The Edge. “We tried really hard to engage voters and get them to invest some time in learning about it.”
Shifting demographics?
One popular theory about why the project passed muster this time is a change in demographics in Great Barrington since the failed 2014 effort. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, real estate professionals in the area reported a surge in home sales to buyers from outside the area.
This created a shortage of available properties and pushed prices up even further, the Berkshire Board of Realtors told the Great Barrington Selectboard in September 2020.
“We had COVID, and a lot of people moved here from elsewhere, people with kids, retirees, people who came from congested urban areas outside of Boston and New York City,” Lahr said. “Those communities invest millions and millions of dollars into their schools. This project, compared to what those communities invest, was probably seen as a bargain.”
Lahr has a point: Several wealthier eastern Massachusetts communities passed bonding and Proposition 2½ override referendums on the same day Berkshire Hills voters were heading to the polls in November. Taxpayers in upscale Lexington approved a controversial new high school costing $660 million, while voters in less-wealthy Stoneham overwhelmingly approved a $190 million new high school.
Dillon agreed: “Intuitively, I think issues around COVID changed things, and more folks from the cities moved in and that may have helped. And there may have been a group of slightly older folks who may have retired and moved away.”
Local optimism v. national turmoil?
Finally, Dillon cited a phenomenon that was palpable but difficult to quantify: Like the rest of their fellow Americans, voters in the Berkshire Regional School District are confronted on a daily basis with the dysfunction and unending drama in the nation’s capital—a phenomenon over which they seemingly have little control. But voting to build a new high school was seen as a positive step voters could take amid the partisan drumbeat of daily outrages in Washington and beyond.
Dillon called it “homegrown local optimism in the face of daunting or overwhelming politics on the national level.” Voters said to themselves: “We may not be able to control everything, but we can come out and vote for this thing that’s going to matter really deeply to our children and grandchildren.”
“Right now with all the cuts happening to government funding, we have the state offering tens of millions of dollars to bolster our community,” Gold added. “A lot of people got engaged this time. I feel like local politics is where it’s at. I hope the people who were involved [in the new high school effort] run for local office.”
