Great Barrington — During a public hearing on the proposed Fiscal 2023-24 budget for the Berkshire Hills Regional School District on Thursday, February 16, staff members at the Berkshire Hills Regional School District spoke in favor of increasing a library position at Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School from part-time to full-time. The potential change was the major topic of concern during the public hearing, which lasted less than 15 minutes.
The proposed operating budget for Fiscal 2023-24 is $33,521,858, a $1,970,861 increase from this current fiscal year’s operating budget of $31,550,997. As detailed in the school district’s budget book for Fiscal 2023-24, the proposed total budget for Fiscal 2023-24, which includes operating and capital costs, is $35,238,733, a proposed $1,791,631 increase from this fiscal year.
“There is not any fat in the budget,” Superintendent of Schools Peter Dillon said at the hearing. “[What] we’re trying to continue to do is to provide high-quality education for all our students to focus on their social-emotional learning and to provide equitable access for everybody.” Superintendent Dillon said that they are planning on making “small shifts” when it comes to school district personnel, including adding a full-year directed study supervisor for Muddy Brook, a certified teacher for the early childhood program at Monument Mountain High School, and an additional health teacher at the high school.
The first member of the public to speak at the hearing was Kerry Manzolini, a fourth-grade teacher at Muddy Brook, who said that she has been working at the school for 12 years. Manzolini said she was speaking on behalf of school Library Specialist Laura Dupont. “She asked me to speak on behalf of our library position at the elementary school and how important it is to the children at Muddy Brook,” Manzolini said. “We used to have a full-time Spanish teacher and a full-time librarian. In all of these 12 years I have been at the school, they have gone away. I think that we’re not providing access to all of our elementary school children to literacy. I think it’s really important and fundamental that a school should guarantee knowledge, culture, and literacy.”
Manzolini said that she hopes that the district reconsiders staffing positions at the elementary school, especially the librarian position. “I just feel like as time goes by, these positions are going to be forgotten, and they are needed,” Manzolini said. “We need a lot of help supporting our elementary school children so they can be successful when they go to middle and high school. It seems like sometimes there is more of [a budget] allocation towards middle and high school students, and I’m advocating for more of it to go towards the elementary school so that the children can have a good foundation [of learning] before moving on.”
Dupont, who works at the school as both a part-time librarian and part-time interventionist, said she hopes the board makes the librarian position full-time. “I was under the impression that it was part-time because it was kind of a year to recuperate from [the pandemic], and the district would bring the librarian position back to full-time the following year,” Dupont said.
Housatonic resident Erica Mielke, who is the Director of Finance for the Railroad Street Youth Project, said she wanted to hear a discussion from the district’s Finance Subcommittee about any potential long-term plan on how the district could avoid cutting certain types of services. “There was one short year where I was the half-time long-term substitute for the Spanish position,” Mielke said. “The Spanish position was eventually cut from the budget. It eventually went from full-time to part-time to non-existent. I understand the real need to cut things because of the rising prices of other items. But I’m just wondering what is the long-term solution to this sort of squeezing of certain line items?”
In response, Superintendent Dillon said that, over time, the school district has added and reduced positions, and has reallocated resources to create other positions. “While some of the things that were said are entirely accurate, they don’t necessarily tell the whole story,” Dillon said. “We don’t have a Spanish teacher in the elementary school. That’s true. The librarian role this year was part-time instead of full-time.” Dillon said that “people will remember the reductions over the years, but we don’t often remember the additions over the years.” He explained, “There’s a new clinician and an additional ESL [English as a Second Language] teacher in the elementary school. We’re adding a directed studies coordinator in the elementary school, which has been a position in the high school and middle school for a long time, but never in the elementary school. It’s important to realize that, over time, some positions are eliminated because there are fiscal crunches, and then in other times some positions are added.”
Dillon said that class sizes in the schools had been taken into consideration when it comes to personnel and budgets. He said that the proposed budget did not have monetary allocations for a full-time librarian position at the elementary school, but the board could change this. “I hear what they’re saying, and I think a full-time librarian could be quite interesting and valuable in that building,” Dillon said. “But do we do this at the expense of someone else [in the budget]? Or do we increase the budget? I think it’s a conversation worth having.”
“It’s not quite that easy of a question,” Board Chairman Stephen Bannon said. “That’s why we’re not voting [on the proposed budget] tonight. When COVID hit, there were some drastic shifts. Not cuts or reallocations. The reality is that we have smaller classes, and it worked out that there weren’t any massive cuts at the schools. This committee has never endorsed massive cuts as long as I’ve been on it.”
Eventually, after some discussion, the board tentatively decided to have a discussion about the proposed budget, and the possibility of a full-time librarian at the elementary school, for a Finance Subcommittee meeting on Thursday, March 2.
