Sheffield — The Selectboards and Finance Committees from two of the five towns that comprise the Southern Berkshire Regional School District are balking at the district’s 3 percent budget increase for the coming year. Both boards in Sheffield and New Marlborough voted unanimously to “not recommend” the school’s $15 million budget for their annual town meetings coming up in May.
It’s a familiar story for those who watched the agonies unfold over neighboring Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s budget, and the close calls as cuts to teachers and an early childhood program nearly hit the chopping block due to mandatory increases like health insurance.
SBRSD Superintendent David Hastings
Unlike the Berkshire Hills budget angst in Great Barrington, however, in Sheffield, which will see a 2 percent decrease in its school assessment, the Selectboard in a January letter told the School Committee and Administration that it wanted to see a level-funded operating, capital and debt expenditures budget for fiscal 2016.
“We understand that this request contains some difficulty, but we are all striving to keep municipal services affordable for all of our residents,” said the letter, signed by three of the Board’s members.
Southern Berkshire Superintendent David Hastings wrote back that “long and difficult efforts” were made to find ways to cut, and that “we were able to level-fund or cut virtually all discretionary budget lines, including the elimination of one faculty position.”
But, Hastings wrote, the 3.34 percent increase was due to union contracts that stipulated “built-in increases,” as well as the 13 percent increase in health care costs.
“I understand that the Selectboards are doing what they are supposed to do to try to protect the taxpayers…it was $600,000 that we had no control over,” Hastings said by phone. He also said there are still some uncertain variables. “If the union negotiates lower raises that could change things a bit…but I really had to budget for the status quo.”
SBRSD Committee Chair Carl Stewart
Hastings said the 3 percent increase is the “lowest [school budget] increase in the county.”
“There’s no fluff [in the budget],” said School Committee Chairman Carl Stewart. He said it was “understandable that that some people in the community are not happy. No one wants to pay more real estate taxes, and no one wants to lower the quality of education. People are complaining on both sides.”
Both Stewart and Hastings said that the only way around the increase is to start cutting staff.
“That’s really a problem,” Stewart said. “We don’t have excess staff.”
“We would have to do horrible things,” Hastings said. “We don’t have any bad teachers, though teachers [sometimes] retire.”
Vito Valentini
At an April 2 school committee meeting, member Vito Valentini was demonstrably angered by the Sheffield Selectboard’s idea of a level-funded budget, which “means a reduction in staff, period. There is no place else to take the money. There is no place to absorb. The absorption here is, ‘you’re fired, you’re fired, and you’re fired’.”
He further noted that the district must absorb a loss — which it also has no control over — of 6 percent due to students who choice out of the district. He said that level-funding the budget would require a roughly $500,000 cut. “That’s somewhere in vicinity of eight or nine positions,” he said.
Previous to that meeting, the letters continued back and forth between Hastings and the Sheffield Selectboard, in which Hastings was apologetic that he had not responded in writing to an earlier letter from the board, thinking, he said, that there would be a meeting. “We have to do a better job talking to the towns,” he said by phone. “That’s the takeaway.”
Sheffield Selectboard member Rene Wood
When asked what the district could do to level-fund its budget without harming the schools, Sheffield Selectboard member Rene Wood said that while, “we don’t get into micromanaging” the school budget, “I don’t think anything can be off the table.”
“We understand we have unions, benefits, contracted obligations,” she said. “Our town was subject to the same insurance costs this year. We didn’t put up our hands and say we can’t do anything about it.”
Wood noted that union negotiating season for the next 3-year contracts is coming up. She wondered if reductions could be made there.
And, she said, “there are districts that are having to cut teachers and programs.”
“Our job is to look out for the taxpayers in Sheffield,” she added. She said the district’s budget has “increases of a high amount every year. It’s up to them to find out how they are going to present their budget.”
“It’s our job [to tell them] if we see an issue.”
And so the Selectboard did. Wood read the board’s letter at the April 2 school committee meeting, and when a member of the committee tried to ask her a question, she said she wouldn’t answer, but must bring questions back to the board, instead. This began the general response from the committee of “shock and disdain,” Wood said, “which is hard to believe since we’ve been consistent in our message.” She said the “level of discourse” was “discouraging.”
The discussion did, indeed, go down a prickly path. Yet school committee member Charles Flynn, who is also an Egremont Selectman, appeared more disappointed than anything. “These are same issues over and over and over again,” he said. “At what point are we going to step up to the plate and honor that our children are our future taxpayers. The better education we provide for them, the better able they will be to pay those taxes.”
Crossing guard volunteer Susan Bachelder leads students and parents across Route 23 in front of the Egremont Elementary School. Photo: David Scribner
“We are not like New Marlborough,” Wood said by phone, “where they’re saying close the [smaller] schools. Were not trying to tell them how to do their budget.” The district operates the small pre-K through 4th New Marlborough School, the South Egremont and Monterey schoolhouses, in addition to the Sheffield campus that houses Mt. Everett High and Undermountain Elementary.
Unlike Sheffield’s decrease, however, New Marlborough will have an assessment increase of 3 percent ($81,086), and the town’s Selectboard and Finance Committee aren’t too happy about it; their joint letter to Hastings and Stewart reminded them that they thought district would construct a budget that would keep New Marlborough’s assessment the same as the previous year.
This provoked ridicule from Valentini at the April 2 meeting, and he suggested it might even be illegal to favor one town over another in such a way.
New Marlborough’s letter raised the consolidation question as well, referring to it as “inevitable,” and noting “our decreasing population of children.” Due to increasing school operating budgets, there here has been ample controversy in recent years over the continued operation of the Monterey School, a one-room schoolhouse, and the South Egremont K-1 two-room schoolhouse. The letter used the closure of the Monterey School as leverage, saying that until the district gave “serious consideration” to closing it, which would protect the quality of “our existing programs, we cannot support the proposed budget.”
A pageant prepared by kindergarten and first grade students at the Monterey School. Photo: David Scribner
On Monday (April 14) some school committee members floated an idea to New Marlborough selectmen that the district, in order to ease their concerns and determine financial viability of certain programs, would establish “parameters to evaluate any program in the district,” said Hastings. But, he said, “the idea may have crashed and burned,” after another meeting Wednesday night in which Valentini, among other school finance subcommittee members, expressed doubt about it. Hastings said the reason was that it “might be seen to some communities as an attack on their school, and the school committee doesn’t want to be seen that way. The smaller schools are traditional schools, they’ve been there a very long time…there are people 90 years old who went to those schools.”
Hastings said the idea was “in limbo,” and that he would put it on the agenda for the April 30 school committee meeting.
Of the overwhelming community support to spring for a new pellet boiler and roof for Mt. Everett Regional High School, there was “no question of endorsing capital improvements,” Wood said, adding that she “personally resents” the maxim that “if you don’t support the budget you don’t support education.”
Wood, as well as Stewart and Hastings all agreed that district taxpayers have always been supportive. “You can’t beat the people in these towns for the way they support the schools,” Hastings said.
And that new pellet boiler and roof for Mt. Everett, Stewart said, will save the district “money on heating and electricity…plus energy credits in the range of $50,000 per year, which we will put towards the payment of the bond.”
Stewart, who says that consolidation of schools in the area is “in the near future,” said that worker expenses, which make up the bulk of the budget, have “always gone up and I think it has to,” due to “cost of living increases.”
Stewart said his committee and the administration will “have more interaction with the community, and try to come up with creative solutions.”
Click here to view the Southern Berkshire Regional School District’s FY2016 budget.
The April 2 Southern Berkshire Regional School Committee meeting can be viewed on
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