Mount Greylock District Requiring COVID-19 Vaccines for Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School District and its union have agreed to require vaccinations against COVID-19 for employees of the PreK-12 district.
Through the end of the current school year, all teachers, paraprofessionals and cafeteria workers must provide proof of vaccination within a reasonable time as a condition of employment, according to a memorandum of agreement ratified by the School Committee last Thursday.
The agreement allows for religious and medical exemptions. The former requires an affidavit from the employee attesting to their "sincerely held religious beliefs"; the latter requires documentation from a medical professional.
Any employee who receives such a waiver must participate in the district's weekly pooled testing program, the MOA reads.
"The vaccination mandate is a mandate that impacts all the bargaining units the union represents," Superintendent Jason McCandless told the committee. "Our intent is that it is absolutely a condition of employment across the entire district.
"It applies to everyone who is not covered by the CBA, including the superintendent and everyone in the organizational chart."
In a separate vote last Thursday, the School Committee also approved an MOA that modifies the union's contract to allow more teacher lunch duty at the middle/high school during the remainder of the 2021-22 school year. The change is designed to take some of the burden off staff currently overseeing lunch periods.
The MOA notes that the lunch period duty at Mount Greylock, "has placed an undue burden on the paraprofessionals assigned to cover these duties."
McCandless in the meeting thanked the teachers for joining in the effort to relieve that burden on their colleagues.
The district's contract with the Mount Greylock Educators Association limits a teacher's lunch room duty to one assignment every other week. Under the agreement ratified last week, that restriction is lifted through June 2022.
In other COVID-related business last week, the School Committee agreed unanimously to authorize McCandless to draft a letter to the member towns' representatives in Boston encouraging permanent changes to the Open Meeting Law to allow virtual or "hybrid" meetings.
The OML allows members of public bodies to participate remotely, but it requires that a quorum of that body be present physically at a meeting location; in other words, the statute would allow for up to three members of the seven-person School Committee to participate remotely, but the body cannot meet without at least four members in the same room.
That provision of the OML was suspended in 2020 by executive order, a move that generated countless Zoom meetings across the commonwealth. Last year, the governor's emergency came to an end, but the legislature enacted its own temporary provision to allow for suspending that one provision of the OML.
The Mount Greylock panel on Thursday decided to ask its lawmakers to support legislation to make the virtual option permanent.
"It makes your lives doable and your service [to the committee] doable," McCandless said of the ability to meet remotely. "It will increase the diversity of people willing to step up and serve. I would suggest it actually increases public interaction with the business of the School Committee.
"I would suggest this is one of the opportunities the pandemic has thrust upon us."
School Committee members commented that the ability to meet remotely has eased child-care concerns for parents who might want to serve on the committee and has eliminated the need for residents of Lanesborough to make the trip to Williamstown if they want to attend committee meetings. It also eliminates the need to worry about winter travel conditions on meeting nights, Steven Miller noted.
The committee's February meeting also was the time for Williamstown Elementary School Principal Cindy Sheehy to announce to the wider community the sixth-grade pupils who were chosen by the school's faculty to receive the annual Helen Renzi Citizenship Award.
Rose Rudin, Parker Langenback, Fiona Whaley and Jackson Sheehy are this year's recipients, giving them the honor of selecting a book to be included in the WES library.
"Helen Renzi was a longtime Williamstown teacher and administrator," Cindy Sheehy said. "She believed ultimately the most important thing you could be is a good person.
"With our fifth- and sixth-grade teachers as well as with our specialist teachers, they got together to determine which of our sixth-grade students best exemplified those qualities of being a good citizen and the qualities that are really important to us at WES – working on kindness, enthusiasm and helping others."
