Times have changed, but the formula remains stuck in 1949. The wealth disparities between neighboring towns simply did not exist at anything like their current scale. The founders of the regional school system could not have foreseen the inequity their formula has imposed on most towns today.
Great Barrington Health Office Jayne Smith said that there isn’t a lab in the region that could pinpoint the E. coli strain by type of animal, however. The value of E. coli testing, she said, is that it is an “indicator organism that there is feces present.”
