Stockbridge — Citizens of Stockbridge, West Stockbridge and Great Barrington: Mark Tuesday, November 4, on your calendars.
Not only is that the date of the 2014 general election, it is also the day on which, thanks to a measure signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick last week, voters in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) will consider underwriting a $51 million proposal to renovate the 50-year-old Monument Mountain Regional High School facility in order to bring it up to current educational, environmental and security standards, and to upgrade its basic infrastructure.
On August 23, the governor signed legislation jointly sponsored by state Sen. Benjamin Downing (D-Berkshire) and state Rep. William F. “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox), that permits balloting on the school project to occur during the full 13 hours that the polls are open.
The BHRSD School Committee had approved the November 4 date for a vote on the project, provided the extended hours were adopted. Previously, state law had limited voting on local spending issues to eight hours.
One last detail of the November 4 vote, however, has yet to be determined, according to Superintendent Peter Dillon. The School Committee, he said, will confer with Secretary of State William F. Galvin about including the project as an item on the general election ballot. Otherwise, voters will be confronted with two ballots and two procedures for voting.
A year ago November 5, voters in Great Barrington rejected both the funding for the project and the accompanying Proposition 21/2 override for what was then proposed to be a $56 million renovation project, though both items were approved in both Stockbridge and West Stockbridge, and a bare majority of voters district-wide endorsed the renovation.
“Having the school project vote on Election Day this time is a game changer,” observed School Committee member Richard Dohoney of Great Barrington. “It will double the turnout.”
“I would agree with that,” commented School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon.
Whether a greater turnout will reverse the outcome of last year’s balloting remains to be seen.
This time round, school officials, convinced that the renovation is financially and educationally imperative, have pared $4 million from the original renovation plan, preserving state reimbursement of $23.2 million. Thus, the amount to be raised by the three district towns is $28 million.
Proponents of the project, organized under the rubric Monument Matters, argue that the renovation project will cost taxpayers significantly less in the long run than doing the series of repairs and upgrades that the aging building requires to meet Department of Education standards.
This position, supported by detailed financial documentation now in its final stages of completion, will be presented during a series of three information forums and additional neighborhood meetings in September, explained Karen Smith, co-chair with Rebecca Gold of the Monument Matters outreach committee.
The first forum is scheduled for Monday, September 8, at the Berkshire South Community Center at 7:15 p.m. The second, at a time yet to be announced, will take place Saturday, September 13, at the high school and will offer child care. The third will take place on Tuesday, September 16, at the Claire Teague Senior Center.
The forums are intended to be informational only, explained Superintendent Dillon, and “will not advocate particular points of view.”
“First off, it has to be said that children are our greatest assets,” Outreach co-chair Karen Smith said during an interview this week. “They are our children. Not yours, not mine – they’re ours. It does take a village.”
She insists that the revised renovation plan is in both the short- and long-term financial interests of the district.
“During the information gather sessions we held during the past year, we heard loud and clear that people thought the project cost too much,” she said during an interview this week. “We went back to the Massachusetts School Building Authority with a proposal to cut $10 million from the project. But they said we could cut only $4 million and still maintain the state reimbursement.”
According to figures compiled by school officials and the MSBA, the cost for just the essential repairs and upgrades to the high school’s aging infrastructure is $38.6 million. But the state would only reimburse the district for $4.9 million of that amount, leaving the district’s towns having to finance $33.7 million.
Smith also pointed out — in contrast to critics of the project who claim that the school is too large for current and future enrollment – that according to current state guidelines allocate more space per student than in the past the capacity of Monument Mountain Regional High School is 570 students.
Current enrollment exceeds that, and is expected to remain at – or slightly above – its current level for the next decade, according to MSBA estimates.
“This is their estimate, not ours,” Smith noted. “The MSBA doesn’t want to allocate building reimbursement funds to a district that is cooking the enrollment books.”
And, she added, in answer to those who complain that school choice has burdened the district with students from other districts for whom Berkshire Hills is not adequately reimbursed, BHRSD calculations show that the district actually nets $1,142,000 from the school choice enrollment.
“Why get rid of choice?” Smith asks.
