Great Barrington — Plans to merge the Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire regional school districts into a single district continue to move forward.
The group held its first in a series of virtual community conversations via Zoom on Tuesday, June 28, where it presented its plans and received feedback from the community. According to data presented at the meeting by members of the board, from 2000 to this year, enrollment in the two school districts has dropped by 35 percent.
See Edge video below of last night’s meeting of the Regional School District Planning Board:
As of this school year, both school districts combined have 1,752 students enrolled, with 1,164 students enrolled in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, and 588 students enrolled in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District.
The committee projects that by 2030, the combined districts will have 1,280 students enrolled, including 877 students enrolled in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, and 403 students enrolled in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District.
“Even in the face of declining enrollment, our operating costs are going up,” board Chair Lucy Prashker said. “We are dealing with flat state revenue for the school districts that are projected to continue. We have increased educational support needs for the students. All of these things combined have increased the educational and support needs of the students. And all of these things combined, put increasing pressures on our districts to be able to continue to provide the necessary educational resources, access, and opportunities for our kids to succeed.”
According to a study conducted by the consulting company The Abrahams Group, for fiscal year 2022 the Berkshire Hills Regional School District is projected to have a $366,966 shortfall which is then projected to increase to $611,515 in fiscal year 2026. Meanwhile, the Southern Berkshire Regional School District is expected to not have a shortfall in fiscal year 2022, with $39,812 projected to be left over in its budget. However, by fiscal year 2026, the school district is expected to have a shortfall of $261,142.
Meanwhile, the Regional School District Planning Board’s (RSDPB’s) research team estimates that savings would be “in the range of $1.5 million to $2.1 million annually” if the eight towns approved the board’s preferred model of merging the districts, which would house students in grades 9-12 at a new Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, while leaving all the elementary schools intact.
As part of the merger plans by the RSDPB, students from Mount Everett and Monument Mountain High School in Great Barrington would be sent to a new high school, which would be built on the campus of Monument Mountain.
Since early 2020, research and discussion on the potential merger of the school districts have been conducted by the board.
The board is made up of three members apiece from the eight towns that are served by the school districts, including Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge from the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, along with Alford, Egremont, Monterey, New Marlborough, and Sheffield from the Southern Berkshire Regional School District.
“While we may have different opinions as to what the best solutions may be to these challenges, I believe that we share a common goal and objective that we want our schools to be just as strong as they can be,” Prashker said.
Project manager Jake Eberwein told the audience that, throughout two years and over 100 meetings, the board looked at three different scenarios for both school districts to go forward with.
The scenarios included combining both districts into one, creating two regional school districts with one handling grades pre-kindergarten to eighth grade and the other handling high school grades, and maintaining the two separate districts but with more collaboration between them.
“While we often think of district or town lines as signaling significant differences, we found that the two districts have a lot in common,” Eberwein said. “We know that our school buildings aren’t full. They’re about half full in several cases. Through our research, we discovered that there are a lot of organizational and operational redundancies between the school districts.”
Eberwein said that the committee eventually decided to favor the scenario of having the two districts merge, with all existing elementary and middle school buildings continuing to operate.
However, as part of the potential merger, a new merged 9th through 12th-grade high school building will be built on the Monument Mountain High School campus in Great Barrington. During the meeting, committee officials did not present plans for the proposed building.
As for the possibility of job loss due to the merger, Eberwein would not give specifics.
“We strove to minimize job loss and believe that any faculty staff reductions can be achieved primarily through attrition over time,” Eberwein said.
Eberwein said that “the timeline is not fixed” but that the committee expects to put together a draft regional agreement within the next six months. The agreement will be voted on by the board in either December or January and then would be sent to each town for a vote.
Prashker said that the votes would be at individual town meetings and that the majority of residents at each town meeting would have to approve the agreement for the agreement to go forward.
At the June 28 meeting, most attendees expressed support for the planned agreement.
“I think that one concern in people’s minds is that the blending of these two separate cultures would cause the loss of identity for one or both high schools, or that the students and teachers will not be able to blend,” attendee Susan Engel said. “I don’t worry about that because I think this will be the greatest strength of this merger. This will be better for the children in South County, and for the teenagers who will become part of a more varied group. I think the things people are worried about will become its greatest strength.”
“Something that I struggle with as a parent is a struggle between sheltering your child from the world and allowing your child to flourish in the world,” attendee Lauren Hyde said. “I don’t think having more students in a student body would be negative for my children. I think it would only help them become better people if they were exposed to more things.”
However, Mt. Everett High School 7th and 8th-grade science teacher Asha Von Ruden said that she and other members of the school community were against the district merger plans.
“I’m in the school with the kids and the other teachers, and the consensus is that this is something that is getting done to us,” Ruden said. “It’s not something that people want. It has to do with the cultures of the two school districts. Some kids may be friends with kids from the other districts, but overwhelmingly, the cultures of the districts are very different. There needs to be a lot of work done to ensure the students of Mt. Everett that their concerns and voices are heard. That it’s not going to be [that] Monument Mountain High School is gobbling up Mt. Everett students, because that is the feeling right now.”
A second virtual community conversation is scheduled for Thursday, June 30, at 5:30 p.m. The committee is planning to present its proposed merger plans at meetings in individual towns over the next few months.
Correction: In an earlier version of this story, it was incorrectly stated that the merger would result in the closing of Mt. Everett High School. According to separate emails from both Eberwein and Prashker, Mt. Everett would not close as the result of the merger. “Currently, Mt. Everett is grades 6-12,” Eberwein wrote to The Berkshire Edge. “The preferred model results in grades 9-12 combining with the Monument students in the new, combined high school in Great Barrington. However, grades 6-8 stay at Mt. Everett, which will remain in use. There was a model we considered that did include moving the SBRSD middle grades to the Great Barrington campus, but that was not approved as the preferred model.”
