GREAT BARRINGTON — For the third time in three-and-a-half years, the Berkshire Hills Regional School District has been told by the state that it is not yet in line to get tens of millions in aid to rebuild Monument Mountain Regional High School.
In an April 14 letter, Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) CEO James A. MacDonald and deputy CEO John K. McCarthy told Berkshire Hills superintendent Peter Dillon: “Based upon the MSBA’s review and due diligence process, it has been determined that the Monument Mountain Regional High School’s SOI will not be invited into the MSBA’s Eligibility Period at this time.”
As is its general practice, the MSBA did not say why it would not fund construction this time around. Nor did it in January 2020 when the district received a letter that said much the same thing. Ditto December 2018.
The MSBA did say something about the competitive nature of its construction grant program. In the most recent cycle, for example, the MSBA received 71 statements of interest for consideration from 71 different school districts in the state for the 2020 cycle. In reviewing the SOIs, the MSBA says it “identifies the schools facilities that have the greatest and most urgent need based on an assessment of the entire cohort of SOIs that are received for consideration each year.”
The letter was included in the School Committee’s packet in advance of Thursday’s regular meeting. Click here to see the agenda. The topic is expected to be discussed at some length.
After the last MSBA rejection in January 2020, the school committee weighed the merits of submitting another proposal or bypassing state aid entirely and going it alone, but ultimately decided to try again. The committee surely will revisit that decision on Thursday.
The MSBA’s 2020 letter, void as it was of any explanation for the rejection, sparked a debate among school committee members as to whether the authority could legally withhold the reasons while still complying with the state’s open-meeting and public document laws.
In an Edge interview, Superintendent Peter Dillon said of the MSBA process, “It’s always about the range of needs versus the capacity to fund and support those needs.” The ability for the district to fund its own share of a new high school was called into question twice in the last decade.
This will be the third try since 2013 to get state aid for the aging high school. Within the span of one year, a pair of $50 million-plus proposals failed when Great Barrington, by far the largest of the three towns in the district, failed to approve an override to Proposition 2½, a state statute that limits tax levy increases. In both cases, the state would have paid for nearly 41 percent of the cost, not counting incentives.
Dillon said when the administration drafts another SOI, as he expects the school committee will direct him to do on Thursday, the statement will, in part, contain updates on what has transpired at the district, including various grants — some of them quite substantial — that have come in over the last few months.
These include an implementation grant of $336,709 from Mass IDEAS and a grant of more than $800,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice for building safety, mental health, anti-bullying, and anti-racism work.
In addition, Great Barrington, the one town in the district that effectively vetoed the two previous proposals, is in a better position financially, in part because of its share of revenue from cannabis sales within the town’s borders. Late last year the town’s Community Impact Fund Committee voted to award $80,000 to Berkshire Hills to help fund a health and wellness position.
“The fact that we continue to get federal, state and privately-funded grants is an indication, in my mind, that people think we’re doing good work and have our act together,” Dillon said.
Dillon also pointed to an amendment to the regional agreement governing the school district. That amendment, which was approved in town meetings, changed the way the three member towns will pay for capital projects such as the one being contemplated now. That amendment makes paying for capital projects more favorable to Great Barrington taxpayers than in 2014 when the second try at rebuilding Monument failed. The other two towns in the district are Stockbridge and West Stockbridge.
The district has also greatly strengthened its vocational program and the school committee unanimously approved to implement the “Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All” program which effectively ends the practice of tracking students according to ability in favor of the more inclusive approach of heterogeneous groupings.
“Our educational vision continues to get clearer and clearer,” Dillon said. “We have better articulated clear paths to vocational education and, through the Mass IDEAS grant, we have better articulated what our high school is going to look like.”
Finally, Dillon added that all three candidates for the two available seats on the Great Barrington selectboard have come out in favor of renovating the high school, and both the selectboard and the town finance committee endorsed this year’s proposed Berkshire Hills budget.
“That’s a big shift from where we were five or 10 years ago,” Dillon added.
If the school committee approves the drafting of another statement of interest to the MSBA on Thursday, Dillon will bring a draft to the committee’s May 20 meeting. The deadline for receipt is in June, with the authority issuing its decision in November or December.
