WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Transition Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to continue negotiations with the town of New Ashford about the tuition rate at Lanesborough Elementary School.

 

But at least one member of the committee sounded a cautious note about going too far without buy-in from town officials in the district's member towns.

 

New Ashford officially was notified by the district in September of a spring vote by the Lanesborough School Committee to institute a policy aligning tuition rates with the per pupil cost of a school's education as calculated by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

 

The Transition Committee, which now oversees the recently expanded PreK-12 three-school district, including Lanesborough, earlier this year voted to honor the LES Committee decision and set the FY19 tuition rate at the elementary school at $17,314 — a 93 percent increase over the $8,977 the town pays per pupil in FY18. On March 1, the Transition Committee reaffirmed that decision.

 

But last week, the New Ashford School Committee balked at recommending to town meeting a budget that supports the 93 percent hike and suggested a counter offer to the district.

 

"This morning, I had seen the article on iBerkshires and immediately sent a message to [New Ashford Superintendent Peter Dillon]," Mount Greylock interim Superintendent Kimberley Grady told the committee on Thursday night. "I left a voicemail offering two dates to begin to talk about what was in the article. I received back the email that is in your packets."

 

In addition to the tuition "counter offer," the New Ashford committee had questions about its assessment in regard to transportation and special education, and Grady said she would work to clarify the points with New Ashford, a non-functioning school district that has to reach tuition students with neighboring schools for all of its students.

 

As for the tuition rate, Transition Committee members Carolyn Greene and Dan Caplinger both said they support continuing a dialogue with New Ashford. Caplinger suggested it would be more efficient for the two school committees to hold a joint meeting at some point to reach an accord.

 

Chris Dodig, who agreed to help Chairman Joe Bergeron discuss the matter with New Ashford officials, said the Transition Committee needs to be aware of Lanesborough town officials' concerns about funding inequities between the towns when it comes to elementary school funding.

 

"I'd like to get some sense from the Town of Lanesborough at some point that the Board of Selectmen is willing [to compromise]," Dodig said. "If they were unwilling to move, I don't know that negotiations are going to go very far. If they have a willingness to do a phased in approach, it makes sense."

 

Grady said she would reach out to Lanesborough's town manager and the chairman of the Board of Selectmen about the issue.

 

Greene clarified that neither the Board of Selectmen nor the Finance Committee has a formal role in deciding the tuition rate, which is an agreement between school committees.

 

Al Terranova made the same point with more emotion.

 

"We're a responsible for the school system," Terranova said. "We're a regional district. I think we reach out to the [towns'] Select Boards and the Finance Committees and like to work in cooperation with them. But that decision is our decision.

 

"I know the chair of the Select Board and the chair of the Finance Committee think they somehow control the School Committee. We take their input. But decisions on school matters are our decisions."

 

Dodig said he understood that but implied that the Transition Committee cannot completely operate in a vacuum.

 

"We were honoring the agreement [town officials], through the Lanesborough Elementary School Committee, had made," Dodig said. "I'd like to know if we make a decision to change it that they're comfortable with that decision. I know we don't have to [get their approval]."

 

Dodig also noted that any negotiations between the Transition Committee and the New Ashford School Committee would be subject to a town meeting vote on the budget in the sending town.

 

"I went to a Hancock town meeting not too long ago, and they had a serious debate about pulling their [Grades 7 through 12] kids out of Mount Greylock," Dodig said. "To go through all this [negotiation] and have that happen would be a waste of time.

 

"But I guess we can't control that."

 

Thursday's meeting of the Transition Committee began with an impassioned plea from a Lanesborough resident to continue negotiating with the district's partners in New Ashford.

 

"I beg you to take into account what New Ashford has offered you," Jodi-Lee Szczepaniak-Locke said. "[Losing the New Ashford cohort] would not only be detrimental to those nine children but to other children in the school who depend on the tuition revenue that comes in the door.

 

"Those children will come to Mount Greylock, and we've heard how important the tuition revenue is here. I don't think it's fair to ask families to uproot their children in a few short months."

 

Against this backdrop of uncertainty over the LES tuition pupils, the district is moving forward with an FY19 budget that assumes no tuition revenue from New Ashford.

 

Grady presented the FY19 spending plan to the Transition Committee on Thursday night in advance of Tuesday's public hearing and planned vote on the budget the district will send to the member towns.

 

Williamstown's assessment from the district is currently proposed at $11,860,913; Lanesborough's is proposed at $5,881,556.

 

There are a few different ways of breaking down the numbers.

 

The first year of the expanded district requires a bit of analysis when comparing elementary school costs. Some of the expenditures for K-6 education in each town that used to reside in the town budgets have been shifted to the school assessment, and vice versa, with the advent of regionalization.

 

To clarify things for town officials and voters, the district created an "apples to apples" comparison of what towns spent in FY18 (when the elementary schools were town departments) versus the FY19 assessment from the region.

 

Looked at that way, Lanesborough's FY18 cost of $2,520,711 drops slightly to $2,515,291, a decrease of .22 percent for the elementary school portion of the budget.

 

Williamstown's K-6 cost (adjusted for shifts between the town and school budget) goes up from $6,363,216 in FY18 to $6,480,010 for the coming year, a rise of 1.84 percent.

 

For the middle-high school, Lanesborough's assessment for Mount Greylock goes from $3.16 million in FY18 to $3,302,283 this year — $2,686,712 toward the operating budget and a $615,571 capital assessment. The town's portion of Mount Greylock's "all-in" FY19 budget would be a 4.3 percent increase.

 

For Williamstown, the Mount Greylock assessment will be $6.7 million ($5,333,052 for the operating budget and $1,341,754 toward the capital project), up from $6.4 million for the current fiscal year, a rise of 4.4 percent.

 

(Note: The above numbers were changed in the budget ultimately approved by the Transition Committee on March 20).

 

Part of the increase on the Mount Greylock side of the ledger is due to shifts in the way state aid is allocated. Some of the regional school aid that used to accrue to the former 7-12 district now is spread over the expanded preK-12 district, which means that the elementary school appropriations to the towns are slightly lower than they otherwise would have been but the Mount Greylock portions paid by the towns are slightly higher than they would have been.

 

In other business, the Transition Committee heard a report from its Superintendent Search Committee that it has identified two candidates to advance for the full committee's consideration. The district received five applications for the post.

 

Superintendent Search Committee Chairman Steven Miller reported that because of the Transition Committee's condensed timetable for naming a superintendent who can take over this summer — when Grady's interim term expires — the screening panel chose not to conduct interviews with the five candidates before identifying the two finalists.

 

The Transition Committee had charged Miller's subcommittee with advancing up to three names for consideration. Miller said Thursday he had not contacted both the finalists since they were voted in an executive session of the screening panel on Wednesday, and until they have agreed to continue in the process, their names are not part of the public record.

 

The Transition Committee also Thursday voted 7-0 to accept the change order recommended by the district's School Building Committee, which recommended that the district add a new parking lot to the Mount Greylock addition/renovation project at a cost not to exceed $975,000.

 

SBC Chairman Mark Schiek explained his committee's recommendation, noting that it waited until the latest date possible to lock in contracts for the work to be done this summer. The SBC, which has been considering the parking lot work for months, waited as long as it could to pull the trigger because it wanted to have as much information as it could have about the project's contingency line item, from which the district wants to fund the site work.

 

"As of our last meeting, we were 67 percent spent [on the project]," Schiek said. "We had about $1.3 million in the contingency line. That means we're going to have about $300,000 to $400,000 left [after the parking lot] to spend on other changes."

 

"The main question is the demo where we are now," Transition Committee and SBC member Greene added. "But our [owner's project manager] and construction team feel confident there won't be any surprises."

 

Schiek finished that thought.

 

"We've already taken down and abated some areas of the building and haven't run into anything that was completely unexpected yet," he said.

 

"What's been fortunate is that we've been running favorable to our budget. [The parking lot, paid for out of contingency funds] is within the budget approved by the towns to spend on the project."

 

After hearing Schiek explain the SBC's full reasoning for recommending the change order, Caplinger summarized the logic just ahead of the unanimous vote.

 

"So we take advantage of favorable municipal bonds [to pay for it], and we leave money in the [Williams College] capital gift so it can grow in the endowment structure at Williams and be used on other projects as they come up in the future," Caplinger said.

 

Below: September letter to New Ashford by Grady.