To the editor:
Whether you will vote to support the Southern Berkshire and Berkshire Hills regional school districts in merging or not, please be considerate of your neighbors who did the work to investigate the possibilities.
We are your relatives, your friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We were appointed by the selectmen in our towns in 2020 to do this work. We are thoughtful, intelligent, community-loving taxpayers and voters just like you. We did a job and made a recommendation based on the data. The vote taken to recommend to the eight towns’ select boards the draft regional agreement was approved by a vote of 16 to 5, with 2 members who remained silent at the time of the vote and one who was absent. Three-quarters of the board felt the data required us to recommend putting this before the voters and taxpayers of the eight towns.
We did a job we were asked to do. We recommended merger, not take over. We recommended 11 transitional school committee members, who in November 2024 can run for a longer term, to do what both school committees currently do: They approve curriculum and annual operational plans put forth by trusted administrators; they hire architects and develop plans for buildings and renovations. Those expenses are brought to the voters when those details are finalized for what is called the debt-approval vote. The Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board members were not charged by the state to create a curriculum nor to design a building to house 720 students instead of 485.
Please be respectful of the people who did this work. It was done with the highest concern for education now and for the next 50 years.
Nadine Hawver, Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board Member
Sheffield
