Editor’s note: this article was updated on Friday, May 6
Stockbridge — Given what appears to be an impending stalemate between town representatives attempting to overhaul the formula by which the three towns in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District fund education, the district has hired a government finance consultant with lots of school/town finance expertise to advise the committee working on the matter.
Consultant Mark Abrahams.
Berkshire Hills’ Superintendent Peter Dillon told The Edge that Mark Abrahams, president of the Framingham-based The Abrahams Group, will attend the May 10 Regional Agreement Amendment Committee (RAAC) meeting at Stockbridge Town Offices.
A CPA who “taught government accounting for the past 30 years,” Abrahams told the Edge Friday (May 6) he has worked with several regional districts with the same issues, and said he was “the architect on the fiscal plans of the newer regents in the state.” His firm’s website says he “teaches, writes, and consults on governmental financial, operational and performance management,” and his mission is “to make governments better.” His school-based work shows a long list of financial projects related to “school/town financial systems” and regionalization/consolidation.
Abrahams will come to “share assessment models or financial insights,” Dillon said, adding that his roughly $3000 fee will come out of a small account for consultants.
At the fifth RAAC meeting, in which some parties were demonstrably rancorous and not budging, it became clear that changing an agreement that says each town pays for the schools based on how many students it sends was not going to be easy. A pie division that has Great Barrington paying 70 percent of school costs between the towns, and 53 percent of the overall school budget, has incensed some of that town’s taxpayers, resulting in two failed attempts to renovate Monument Mountain Regional High School, and now a growing grass-roots movement to revolt against the school budget at town meeting. Stockbridge and West Stockbridge each pay about 15 percent of school costs among the three towns.
A group calling themselves The Green Tea Party (GTP) stated publicly that it is partly this breakdown at RAAC that is propelling their call to Great Barrington taxpayers, as a symbolic protest, to vote down the school budget at Monday’s Annual Town Meeting.
The entire debate has reignited a crossfire that began before the second Monument High renovation vote, with district parents, residents, school and town officials all taking sides.
And one of GTP’s members said, as a result of the apparent meltdown at RAAC, an expert in such complex economics needed to enter the fray. At the last meeting, Dillon said he would look into hiring a consultant.
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