Editor’s note: The following was written by Sheela Clary in her capacity as a staff member of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District.
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This article is part of a regular series out of Berkshire Hills Regional School District in which we share student and staff news and learning for the goal of increasing communication touchpoints between the community and its public schools.
On Wednesday, December 4, the Monument Mountain Building Project Committee voted to approve a design option for a new Monument Mountain Regional High School, which will be a new three-story, 140,000-square-foot building. Stephen Boyd serves on the committee as a Monument alumnus, current parent, and CEO of local business Boyd Biomedical. He is also the founder and board chair of the Berkshire Innovation Center (BIC); an executive producer and curator of TEDx Berkshires; and an advisor to start-ups, commercial businesses, and municipalities seeking to create economic vibrancy and sustainable growth.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
CLARY
What’s the background of your business, for folks who don’t know you?
BOYD
We have three divisions now with about 70 employees. We’ve evolved from what people may remember as Boyd Converting, which turned into Boyd Technologies and is now Boyd Biomedical. We provide services to design, build, and launch biomedical innovations (or simply products) through our growth platform. Our Design by Boyd hub is in Waltham, and we have a team of design engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, industrial designers, and human factors engineers who are working with our clients at the earliest stages of translational research to take pre-clinical ideas and bring them into a clinical setting to ultimately license or commercialize them. We’re working with Mass General Brigham, Boston Children’s Hospital, universities, and businesses
Our headquarters and Build by Boyd hub is still here in Lee, where we do all of our contract manufacturing, whether it’s a diagnostic strip, a catheter, or an implantable device—you want it to work the same way every time. There’s lots of material science and mechanical engineering associated with the process.
CLARY
What aspects of the plans for the new Monument Mountain are exciting to you, vis a vis your business?
BOYD
When I think about the work the high school has done with their CVTE programs, I’m thrilled that it’s starting to shift from the kind of traditional “Well, you’re either a vo-tech kid who’s going into the trades or you’re going to become a lawyer or doctor.” That’s just not relevant to today’s world, where some of the smartest people in our building spend more time on my production floor and around equipment than they do at a desk looking at a computer.
CLARY
Which high school education pathways do you want to see developed?
BOYD
We’d take high school graduates from the automotive program and out of the engineering or the manufacturing pathway. We have equipment that needs maintenance. [Monument’s Automotive Teacher] Mr. D’Aniello is teaching kids how to look at ball bearings and take technical measurements when they’re fixing a car. Those same moving parts are going on in our equipment, and so we want people listening to the equipment to make sure it runs smoothly. We have both operators and quality technicians who use technical measurement machines, calipers, sensors, and measurement gauges . There’s 10th grade, 11th grade-level math involved. Some algebra and statistics.
Our production is done in clean rooms, so that’s a lot of HVAC and air-handling equipment, so being comfortable with building systems, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems—I could go on and on about the areas where our business has jobs for high school graduates that don’t need a college degree.
CLARY
How much could a new employee expect to earn?
BOYD
They could be making, after a couple of years, between $60 and $90,000. [The median family income in Berkshire County was $69,000 in 2022.]
CLARY
I looked at job openings at General Dynamics recently, and I was struck by how many did not require a college degree.
BOYD
Yes, GD has like 200 job openings at any given moment that they can’t fill. Some of them are software engineers, but there’s lots of assembly jobs right there in Pittsfield.
CLARY
How will the layout of the selected design option for the new high school show the enhanced value placed on CVTE tracks?
BOYD
The jobs of the future will need hard skills and soft skills, technical know-how, and good communication, and that’s what the new school facilitates. If you’re in a technical space, there will be windows so you can see where the humanities, math, or science are being taught. You’ll walk through the hall and see the auto shop or look down into a maker space, or into the early childhood room, but you’ll be on your way up to the library/media center. All these open spaces open up possibilities and play into what your career could be. Kids start to connect dots (and imagine their future).
CLARY
You mentioned Automotive Teacher Chris D’Aniello. He and his students get creative with the space they’ve got, but he really can’t do traditional classroom instruction with his current set-up, because there’s no classroom.
BOYD
Correct… His students, whether they’re coming to work at Boyd Biomedical or they’re going to Haddad Toyota, cars are computers now, and there’s an element of getting under the hood but there’s a whole other side of it that is basically desk work, and this new high school has been designed to incorporate both.
CLARY
Did you read the Stoke Report, completed for the district by the Stoke Collective? Students reported feeling stigmatized by being called “A-Wingers,” which was a school-based slur for the students whose center of gravity in the building was the Automotive wing.
BOYD
Yes, we referred to them as the A-wingers when I was going around [in the early 1990s]. My group of friends liked to hang out around the library. That’s where the “smart” kids were, and there was only one kind of smart. The notion was that if you’re really smart you go to Harvard, and if not, you’re in the A Wing and you’re destined for minimum wage. That’s just not the case.
We [at Boyd Biomedical] have lots of quirky Ph.D. engineers who come in and have a theory where the material science will add up, but you just can’t make it at scale. We had one just the other week. Someone had invented an anti-microbial foam that had Chitosan, shrimp shell, in it. It was great, but it was fluffed up in a way that it wouldn’t run through the equipment, so mechanically, it didn’t work. The Ph.D. was solving a problem that didn’t exist.
A grittier kid is like, “I want to solve a real world problem.” There’s lots of types of smart, and maybe the career and technical education kids and the college bound kids can learn from one another. I think that’s what the school will do when you open it up. That’s part of why I like a smaller footprint and a more vertical school. I think it becomes a beehive for everyone to see and become aware of each other.
CLARY
What other aspects of the new building design are you enthusiastic about?
BOYD
Maybe it’s just that we’ve been blessed, but I think that the new building is much safer, much more secure for our students and community. It’s got less points of entry.
CLARY
If you could see into the future 10 years down the road, how will a new high school be impacting the local economy and vitality of the greater Great Barrington region?
BOYD
I always think of Sundance, Utah. It’s an amazing place to visit. It’s got incredible mountains and all kinds of natural resources, and it’s got the film festival. You know what it also has? An incredible film school, and it’s got a ton of industry around the film and media for best boys and grips and electricians. There are really good blue-collar jobs in moviemaking. Sundance took a high-level tourist attraction and made it a year-round industry. Although there are nuances and complications to that situation, the theory does apply to us in Berkshire County.
Here people want to come to Jacob’s Pillow, to Tanglewood. That’s a strength. We should be proud of that. But we need more than that, and this provides us an opportunity to leverage that credibility to support other industries and job growth. When I’m recruiting from outside of the area, after we’re done talking about the job prospects they ask me about housing. Then they ask me about our schools.
