Stockbridge — The March 19 session of the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee was billed as a “meet and confer” conflab.
It would be more aptly described as “meet and defer.”
For months, Great Barrington resident Chip Elitzer has hashed out what he calls a “very hopeful framework for going forward,” a financing concept for fairness that would more evenly spread the Berkshire Hills Regional School District budget over the three towns, so that Great Barrington isn’t so strapped. Just last week he issued a new proposal for possible addition to the Town Meeting warrants in the three district towns.
Elitzer’s proposal, however, will have to wait until next year’s Town Meeting season, since the School Committee last night voted 6-2 to table the motion for “a larger conversation with the community,” said committee member Richard Bradway, who made the motion. Members Richard Dohoney and Bill Fields voted against putting the proposal on hold.
The district is clearly having to grapple with reinventing itself as a three-town partnership with a financially sustainable structure.
Still, the committee did unanimously endorse Housatonic resident Dave Long’s organizational structure for implementing a three-track approach to address the district’s Monument Mountain Regional High School’s aging systems and physical plant. The approach incorporates Monument Principal Marianne Young’s paradigm of working on three parallel tracks concurrently in order to arrive at a place where a renovation to the high school can be financed. The three tracks are: educational vision, funding, and facility repairs and improvements.
Elitzer’s plan would allocate school costs to towns based on assessed property values rather than per pupil cost. In looking at the way the Monument renovation votes went in each town last November, Elitzer said he “dismissed out of hand” the notion the towns differ in the way “they value public education.”
Elitzer was referring, by conference call last night, to the district’s harrowing two years of trying — and failing, due to taxpayer burnout — to finance a fix for a deteriorating Monument Mountain Regional High School.
“I’m not suggesting that we should go to this new allocation method to save Great Barrington taxpayers money…I don’t think GB taxpayers should pay a penny less then they’re paying now. I believe that what’s hopeful about it…there’s really no difference in the support for public education between people who happen to live in Great Barrington or happen to live Stockbridge or West Stockbridge. If that’s true, that means that everyone in the district should be willing to bear the same level of taxation [as Great Barrington].”
What made Great Barrington voters sink the high school project was almost entirely the method used to allocate the school budget to the three towns, since it uses a per-pupil formula in the regional situation where two of the three towns have lower enrollment numbers.
But in order to change the the allocation method, the district’s Regional Agreement requires amending. And to amend it, all three towns must first agree. So far, it appears that West Stockbridge is still gathering information about whether to open the agreement for revision.
Elitzer noted that Great Barrington “has been paying [for schools] at a level that is three times higher than what Stockbridge pays,” and that up to now, Great Barrington Town Meeting “has approved that kind of taxation. We’ve proven over the years that for taxpayers in our district that that level of taxation is sustainable and politically possible.”
Elitzer said that West Stockbridge is slated to pay $7.85 per thousand assessed value. If, he suggested, all three towns paid this same amount — it would create a $2.8 million decrease for Great Barrington, and a $3.9 increase to Stockbridge — “it would result in a net increase for school funding to little over $1.1 million.”
He said the goal is to “put in place a framework that allows us to make this district even better than it is, to give us a firm tax structure that allows us to tax everyone equally and fairly, and provide additional funds.”
“This is a big huge elephant that could end up splitting us apart,” said Terry Flynn, a now-retired, long-time district teacher who is a Stockbridge resident. Flynn said there were “a lot of forces out there” regarding funding and taxation to be considered, and said Elitzer’s proposal was “way too radical a thing for towns to be processing in two months.”
“I think we’re remiss to ignore this opportunity of a concrete proposal,” said committee member Richard Dohoney.
Committee member and Stockbridge resident Jason St. Peter wanted to know if Elitzer had broken down per-pupil costs under his proposal. Elitzer said his reason for not doing so was “philosophical” in that all the towns believe in public education.
But St. Peter said people are asking him why Stockbridge shouldn’t take their consolidation ball and go form an agreement with Lenox or Richmond, “where we’re going to pay a lot less.”
“I’m sure Lenox would love to have a discussion,” he added, “and that’s the last thing I want. I love this district…but I already have people coming [to me]…I don’t want this to turn into a Stockbridge versus Great Barrington scenario, which I already see it doing.”
In his letter to the School Committee the following day, Elitzer noted that a town can’t leave a district without the agreement of all three towns. Elitzer also noted that while per-pupil costs may increase dramatically for Stockbridge under his proposal, the town wouldn’t necessarily be paying that higher amount:
“Stockbridge wouldn’t pay $43,494 per student; in fact, none of the three towns would pay anything, just like they don’t really pay anything now. As in just about every other part of the country, public education financed through property taxes. In some states, like New York and Ohio…the taxes are billed directly by the school district. In Massachusetts, the taxes are collected by the towns on behalf of the school district, but the towns are just a conduit. The payers are overwhelmingly individual homeowners, who are also the voters who approve the annual District budget. The fact that a $1,000 unit of property abutting the GB/Stockbridge line on the GB side is going to pay $9.87 next fiscal year, while a $1,000 unit on the other side of the line is going to pay $3.28 is – in my opinion – an embarrassment for the most liberal county in the most liberal state in the country. Cost per student is how private education works, not public education.”
The full text of Elitzer’s March 20 letter can be read here.
Finance Committee Chair Sharon Gregory said that the regional agreement indicated that the School Committee could take matters into its own hands and vote by a majority to propose a change to the agreement. “I would love to see that kind of leadership,” she said.
Superintendent Peter Dillon observed that the process for revising the district agreement between the three towns is complicated, requiring Town Meeting votes and Department of Education approval. But Dohoney said that he thought the committee would make that move “without hesitation if there were consensus.”
“We understand it’s shocking to Stockbridge,” said Housatonic resident Dave Long, of Elitzer’s proposal. “But we have to directly confront those fears.”
