The final youth-centered forum on the proposed merger of the two high schools serving Southern Berkshire Regional School District (SBRSD) and Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) was held Tuesday afternoon in the student center at Simon’s Rock. Railroad Street Youth Project’s Southern Berkshire Community Health Coalition had convened the three meetings over the past two months and heard from about 30 students total, with the participants invited to respond to two prompts: What excites you about the possible merger, and what are you afraid of losing? While the student participants on Tuesday did answer these questions, they also asked and answered a lot of their own, as well.
The first of the forums was on October 4 at the drop-in center at Railroad Street Youth Project in Great Barrington, with most of the 13 participants coming from BHRSD’s Monument Mountain Regional High School. The second, on November 15, was held at SBRSD’s Mount Everett, with about two-thirds of the 21 student participants hailing from that school. The Simon’s Rock campus was chosen as more neutral territory for this past’s Tuesday forum, which was attended by eight female students—five participants from Monument, and three from Mount Everett—in grades seven through 12.
Director of the South Berkshire Community Health Coalition Laura Rodriguez has facilitated the three forums, passing the student-generated notes and meeting recordings on to the leadership of the Eight Towns Regional School District Planning Board (RSDPB), Chairwoman Lucy Prashker and Project Manager Jake Eberwein. Rodriquez says there was a different flavor to the discussion among youth from the two schools. Monument students focused more on the changes they were eager to see, while for Mount Everett students, she says, “the word ‘home’ came up a lot.” They translated their feared loss of their staff and building into a lost feeling of home.
But Rodriguez took a back seat during the discussions, which were led by the Coalition’s two student interns, seniors Deisy Escobar from Mount Everett and Lily De Movellan from Monument Mountain. On Tuesday afternoon, Escobar and De Movellan took turns jotting down summaries of the visioning brainstorm, in which they and their peers enthusiastically took up the task of sharing their visions of both what a new, combined high school might include, and what new and improved solo high schools might include.
Ideas ranged from the practical (how about a sloped roof?) to the poignant (Can we bring special needs students out of the shadows?) to the whimsical (wind mills). They’d like more sports, more clubs, more gardening, more comfy chairs, a building people feel good walking into, better information on how to go about the college application process. The boys’ locker rooms should be no bigger than the girls’. We should start celebrating different cultures. The offices where students meet with school therapists should have tinted windows for privacy and not be located near the school entrance. The drug counselor should have their own dedicated office space. Design a school with electives in mind, like art. Make it warm and welcoming, not antiseptic like a mall. No brick anywhere, was one request. No cement was another. Incorporate renewable energy, fill the building with natural light, put windows everywhere, bring the natural world inside. At the very least, please get rid of the mold. “I think Monument is a health violation,” said one student, “and should be dealt with no matter what happens.” This visioning was followed up by an inconclusive back and forth about what a new school’s colors and mascot might be. Monument’s ubiquitous maroon, all agreed, should be tossed. The blue in Mount Everett’s blue and gold was more appealing, with several variations suggested, perhaps combined with green. As someone suggested, “If we’re going to be new, we might as well make it NEW.” As for mascot, students felt it should reflect our South County fauna, and keep with a mountain theme.
If participants were not entirely sure how to tackle those two sticky questions, they were much clearer in their support for Deisy Escobar’s soft-spoken idea to set up a hallway full of pictures and memorabilia that would celebrate and integrate the histories of both schools.
Noelia Salinetti is a junior at MMRHS and has attended all three of the student forums. “I’ve learned that conversations with the people who are often talked about but not talked to are important.” She’s also learned a fair bit about how the merger question arose, which helps to address the feeling that it’s being imposed on students without their input and without context. “There’s a general feeling that this thing is just going to happen and we have no control over it, we have no voice in it.” Some things had been cleared up by the start of the third forum, but questions remained, so Salinetti was appreciative that a member of the RSDPB had come to answer questions.
Sheffield Select Board and RSDPB member Nadine Hawver was on hand Tuesday for that purpose and was able to clarify some timing details. For her part, she was very impressed by the smart, savvy answers the group offered, but also noted, “At the end of the day when you ask for a vote, or an opinion, the Mount Everett kids feel like they are being absorbed, which is a worry to me, because they should feel like they are joining together. One school isn’t gobbling up the other, it’s bringing eight towns together.”
The eight towns in ‘eight towns’ are Great Barrington, West Stockbridge, and Stockbridge, which make up BHRSD, and Sheffield, Egremont, Alford, New Marlborough, and Monterey, making up SBRSD. (Adjacent towns such as Mount Washington and Richmond do not form part of these districts, and ‘tuition in’ their school-aged kids to SBRSD and BHRSD, respectively.) The planning board does not have decision-making powers, but has served, since March 2020, as a labor-intensive study group. Then Chairwoman of the SBRSD School Committee Jane Burke nominated attorney Lucy Prashker to lead it, and, between then and now, she’s steered the larger group and sub-committees through more than 140 meetings.
The board’s reason for being is the imperative to address a very steep decline in the local public school student population over the past two decades. BHRSD’s public school enrollment has declined 45 percent since 2000, going from a total of 1,619 that year, to 1,169 this year. SBRSD’s numbers peaked in 2000 at just over 1,000 students, and are projected to drop to 430 by the year 2030, a loss of more than 60 percent.
Meanwhile, each district’s costs expand inexorably every year, as do the needs of our students. We have a fast-growing English Language Learner population and unprecedented numbers of students presenting with social-emotional and mental health challenges. Another recurring theme among the past two and half years’ worth of meetings is the imperative to expand Career Vocational Technical Education (CVTE) programming to offer viable alternatives to the traditional four-year college track, which large numbers of students do not take. (The aggregated college completion rate for graduates from the classes of 2006 through 2016 was just 53 percent at Monument, and 40 percent at Mount Everett.)
Prashker says of the youth forums, “I think they’re a great way to get students engaged in the question, ‘Can our districts do better together than they do apart?’ … We all have an enormous amount of pride in our schools. We tend to cheerlead, and sometimes we’re afraid of identifying gaps. But merger or not, I think it’s critical that we do identify those gaps and explore where we could do better and what more we could offer.”
As the full board prepares to vote thumbs up or down later this winter, and perhaps pass on a merger recommendation to voters at town meetings in the spring, they’re also keen to hear more about this fear of loss that students identified. “I think our board needs to pay a lot of attention to that and do what we can to address those fears,” says Prashker. Part of the fear relates to losing promising new initiatives. SBRSD, for instance, is now designated through the state as an early college site through its collaboration with Simons Rock, and would be loath to do anything to put that partnership and designation at risk.
But as more than one of the older high school students pointed out, most of them will not be as impacted by a potential merger of the high schools as the younger students who would be transitioning to a whole new school in the next few years. Tuesday’s youngest participant was Mount Everett’s Lesly Solis, who had also attended an earlier forum. She stressed the need to get more buy-in from the people like her who are going to be personally impacted by these big changes. “If I were to ask any kid in my grade right now, they would say they don’t know anything about it. It hasn’t been brought to their attention. I only know about it because I’ve been coming to the meetings, and I’m in seventh grade.”
The Eight Towns’ effort will be ramping up their outreach efforts in anticipation of the vote upcoming this winter, with open community meetings planned for January. Refer to the Eight Towns’ website for notices.
