WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School District is looking for a way to address the use of "bias-based" language in the schools.

 

"There is some use of language, particularly in the middle/high school, and it's every middle/high school in America, there is the use of language that every student in the building is old enough to know not to use," Superintendent Jason McCandless told the School Committee on Thursday night. "Those are words that should never come out of your mouth.

 

"Even though I've been in education for 30 years, there have been times when I have been utterly taken aback by the casual use of some language that, to me, and to reasonable people, is some of the most historically charged language an individual could utter."

 

McCandless did not go into specifics of the language in question, but there have been numerous reports in recent years of the use of racial epithets in the schools.

 

The superintendent told the committee at its monthly meeting that he will work with the district's counsel and, perhaps, the commissioner of education to see what kinds of disciplinary actions the district can take.

 

Currently, district policy sets the maximum consequence for a proven use of "bias-based" language at one day of in-school suspension.

 

"I am firmly of the opinion — even though it brushes up against state law — I will go back to my early days of being a teacher in Virginia, when there were a few words that, if you said them out loud, you weren't seen in school for a few days," McCandless said. "Those words were charged enough that you needed to be somewhere else and you needed time to consider that something you took a quarter of a second to say may take the person who was the target of that word days and weeks and months to recover."

 

Any change in district policy that results from the administration's efforts around the offensive language would require the blessing of the School Committee.

 

"We may need new terminology that describes that language, beyond 'bias,' " McCandless said. "The seriousness of that needs to be made immediately clear."

 

His comments Thursday came during a larger discussion about "behavior expectations" in the district. 

 

"We have had some challenges this year," McCandless said. "This is our first full year kind of back to what we would generally consider quote, unquote 'normal.' ... And it is clear that there are some students who, during very formative, crucial, transitional developmental years, were doing school at home, some of them sporadically, in front of a computer screen.

 

"Anybody watching this will understand, this is no secret to anybody, we've had some behavioral struggles in all three of our schools this year."

 

Mount Greylock Regional School Principal Jake Schutz walked the School Committee through the district's existing student behavior policy, which is intended to ensure the safety of students and staff and promote the "best learning experience" the district can provide.

 

Schutz described the district's "progressive response matrix" for disciplinary actions and stressed that suspension, while an option, is "not the first tool out of the tool kit."

 

In response to a comment from School Committee member Julia Bowen, McCandless emphasized that the overwhelming majority of students in the district do behave appropriately in the classroom.

 

"I would say the proportion is 98 percent of the students at Mount Greylock Regional School know why they are there," he said. "They understand that the things they do, the things they say really do impact those around them. … Their sense of empathy and urge to support the people around them is really strong.

 

"It's our job to get the much smaller group of students to understand that about themselves. The potential is there for them as well."

 

Jose Constantine, who was the lone holdout in a 6-1 vote to advance the district's fiscal year 2024 budget last month, asked whether the loss of a potential eight paraprofessionals in that budget might hamper the district's ability to address behavior issues in the classroom.

 

Schutz pointed out that paraprofessionals are not in the class to address discipline but to support individual students, often students in individualized education plans.

 

"When a paraprofessional is in a classroom, they're there for a specific reason to support a specific student, and that student has specific goals and objectives that call for that classroom para support," Schutz said. "Even though the para may, generally, support behavioral management in the classroom by being another adult … the teacher is in charge of the behavioral management in the classroom, not necessarily the paraprofessional. They're tasked with something very focused."

 

McCandless said he did not want to minimize the work that paraprofessionals do in the schools but noted that the "cuts" in the FY24 budget return the district to the level of paraprofessional staffing it had at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year.

 

Adding more paraprofessionals does not necessarily solve the problem, McCandless said.

 

"Unless there is a really specific purpose driven by the IEP, which Jake [Schutz] alluded to, that that paraprofessional is supporting and is capable of supporting, it's really easy to have — I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but I've seen it in almost every organization I've served — you go down that pathway enough times, and you end up with a lot of grownups, and sometimes a disproportionate number of grownups to the number of children, and it's still not solving the problem," McCandless said. "For some students, paraprofessionals are the absolute answer."

 

In other business on Thursday, the School Committee approved Lanesborough Elementary School's annual sixth-grade trip to Cape Cod and agreed to continue in the state's School Choice program.

 

McCandless and Business Administrator Joe Bergeron took the committee through the district's plan for new choice slots in the 2023-24 school year. According to the numbers laid out on Thursday, the district has the potential for 127 new School Choice students if it maximizes grade levels at all three of its schools next year. The administration's plan is to open 39 plus a yet-to-be-determined number in kindergarten at Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary.

 

The state-mandated School Choice reimbursement rate to a receiving school is about $5,000 per student. The district's cost per pupil was nearly $18,000 in FY20, according to the Department of Education's website.

 

Constantine asked why the district is not opening more School Choice spots given the budget constraints it faces going into the next school year.

 

McCandless and Bergeron explained that the district's practice — and their preference — is to use School Choice strategically to fill empty seats in classrooms and maintain diverse academic offerings at the middle/high school rather than as a revenue generator.

 

"Some of the choices we make around right-sizing our number of employees are decisions we need to stick with, no matter what," McCandless said. "Hitting pause on a position [the director of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging] that is important to all of us, and, more importantly, important to our students — we need to make a multiyear commitment to that individual when that individual comes, and I think it's really dangerous to make a commitment on the back of something that can fluctuate as much as School Choice."