Editor’s note: This story has been changed slightly to reflect the correct name of the Waldorf secondary school. It is Berkshire Waldorf High School, not Berkshire Waldorf School.
GREAT BARRINGTON — After several years of steady decline, enrollments in the three schools in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District have risen significantly, Superintendent Peter Dillon reported at Thursday night’s school committee meeting.
Depending on whose numbers you believe — the district’s or the state’s — Berkshire Hills gained either 52 students this year or 16. The state and the district agree on this year’s total enrollment figure of 1,217. But Berkshire Hills says its student population last year was 1,201 while the state places it at only 1,164.
Click here to see the Berkshire Hills report on the student population as of October 1, which is the date the numbers become official, and here to see last year’s report from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.Â
Dillon said he and his staff are looking into why the discrepancy exists. In either case, the increase is welcome news for a district that, along with most others in Berkshire County, has lost students over the last several years.
See the Edge video of the November 4 meeting of the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee. The discussion of the enrollment numbers begins at 8:50:
“That is quite remarkable because you read in the papers constantly the narrative about declining enrollment in Berkshire County,” Dillon said. Referring to the state’s numbers, he quickly added, “A 4.6-percent increase is a big deal.”
Indeed, there has been much media coverage of Berkshire County’s schools and their enrollment declines fueled by lower birth rates and young people moving out of the county to look for work elsewhere, or not returning after going way for higher education. Because of fixed costs, schools with lower enrollments have significantly higher per-pupil costs.
These concerns resulted in the creation of the Berkshire County Education Task Force, which made a “shocking recommendation” in 2017 that included the creation of a single-school countywide school district within 10 years. Berkshire Hills later withdrew from membership in the task force.
Dillon acknowledged that last year’s enrollments were down a little because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some parents pulled their children out to homeschool them, enrolled them in private schools, or moved out of the district altogether.
Over the last several months, however, the district’s full-time population has grown as families from the metropolitan New York and Boston regions moved to Berkshire County seeking refuge from the pandemic. As The Edge reported a year ago, enrollments in the region’s private schools grew significantly, as did voter rolls at many town halls, even as the Berkshire Hills student body shrank.Â
“I’m really happy about this,” Dillon said. “We have seen some people moving into the community and Great Barrington’s overall population is up quite a bit. Some of those people are school age so they’re not all going to public schools, with some going to independent or private schools.”
Like other schools in Massachusetts, Berkshire Hills accepts students from other districts who opt to attend through the state’s public school choice program, which allows students to attend another public school outside their hometown or home regional school district. This year Berkshire Hills has 271 choice-in students, up from 255 last year.
Berkshire Hills also accepts students from districts that do not have their own high schools, chiefly from Richmond and the Farmington River Regional School District, which serves Otis and Sandisfield in grades K-6. Berkshire Hills has 86 tuition-in students, up from 73 in 2020-21.
One board member asked why Berkshire Hills also tuitioned out 26 students. Dillon told her those students were almost all special education students. If a district doesn’t have the resources to educate a disabled student, it will pay other districts, or sometimes even private schools that have appropriate programs that fully address the needs of those students.
In other business, a divided school committee voted 5-4 to “respectfully decline,” in the words of motioning school committee member Rich Dohoney, the Berkshire Waldorf High School‘s request to co-op, or allow its students to participate and become members of the Monument Mountain Regional High School’s football team.
Click here to see the letter of request from the Berkshire Waldorf High School Executive Director Steven Sagarin, and here to see an analysis from Monument Principal Kristi Farina, who did not make a recommendation but listed the advantages and drawbacks of the proposal.
Cory Sprague of Stockbridge and Steve Bannon, Diane Singer, and Anne Hutchinson (all of Great Barrington) voted to allow the proposal. Voting to reject the proposal were Molly Thomas of West Stockbridge, Bonnie Bonn-Buffoni and Jason St. Peter of Stockbridge, and Rich Dohoney and Bill Fields, both of Great Barrington.
