Great Barrington — The Berkshire Hills Regional School District, faced with unavoidable increases in insurance rates, salaries and benefits, utilities and transportation costs and confronting fierce taxpayer resistance in Great Barrington to any increase in education expenditures is set to propose eliminating teacher positions and certain programs across its three schools in order to achieve a savings of $248,626.
“Nobody wants to cut $250,000 from a budget,” said Superintendent Peter Dillon. “The principals and I agree…it’s a bad thing for kids.”
But the district’s proposed budget, having been targeted as the millstone around Great Barrington taxpayers’ necks, appears to have been fashioned to satisfy that town’s disgruntled taxpayers by keeping the assessment increase at 5 percent.
The roughly $860,000 increase in this year’s proposed $24 million (gross) budget is due almost entirely to factors the district has little control over, many of which are mandatory expenses. Salaries and benefits eat up 74 percent of the budget, for instance.
“It was determined with a lot of heavy hearts that we did not find a level program budget to be viable this year,” said finance sub-committee member Richard Dohoney at the Thursday night (February 12) unveiling of the proposed budget in Monument Mountain Regional Middle School’s auditorium. In its first year, the finance sub-committee, along with the principals of the three schools looked at “line by line” costs to find the savings, he said. The committee ran three budget options, but the one the committee chose to recommend was the one that would keep the increase to the towns’ assessments at 5 percent, and that included cuts.
School Committee member Richard Dahomey. At right, BHRSD Business Administrator Sharon Harrison.
“It’s not anything anyone is happy about,” Dohoney said.
The proposed cuts at Muddy Brook Regional Elementary include elimination of the Early Kindergarten (EK) class, one paraprofessional and two teachers (one through attrition). At Monument Valley Regional Middle School one retiring Computer Technology teacher will not be replaced, and stipends for some after school programs and other program development work will be cut. Monument Mountain Regional High School will reduce one math position, and lose an art teacher and a paraprofessional.
Dillon, along with all three principals — Mary Berle of Muddy Brook, Ben Doren of Monument Middle and Marianne Young of Monument High — said these cuts were as far as they could go without savaging the integrity of their schools.
“We’re starting from a place where there’s not a lot to work with,” Berle said. “I think we’re really tight at Muddy Brook.”
Muddy Brook elementary School Principal Mary Berle.
“There’s no where else to cut,” Doren said. “Whatever I cut will have a significant effect.” Doren said the cuts would “slow the pace and depth” of some middle school programming.
With the loss of the high school art teacher, “the art program won’t be as robust or flexible for students’ schedules,” said Principal Young of a historically popular program, that she said “has kept any number of students in school,” and inspired many to go on to art schools and careers. Beyond these cuts, she said, “we’re talking about eliminating programs — we are at a real tipping point with this high school.”
“I don’t believe our parents want a program that’s any more diminished,” Young added.
Neither do students. Reports from the high school say a petition to save the art teacher are circulating, preparing for the February 26 public hearing on the budget to be held at the middle school auditorium.
“To go one round deeper would cause irreparable harm,” Dillon said, noting that the principals worked with deep honesty to determine what cuts wouldn’t do serious damage.
The total net change for assessments to all three towns is a 4.64 percent increase. Great Barrington will see a 5 percent increase, Stockbridge, 7 percent, and a .31 percent reduction for West Stockbridge because fewer students from West Stockbridge are enrolled in Berkshire Hills.
Business Administrator Sharon Harrison addressing the School Committee.
All these numbers could change on March 4, however, when Gov. Charlie Baker’s “House 1” budget is released, much later than the usual January release with a sitting governor explained Business Manager Sharon Harrison. This is inconvenient since the School Committee votes on their budget March 5. Another wait-and-see variable is the state-imposed, complex formula called “the minimum contribution,” which is the minimum amount any town has to pay to support its schools.
It’s been “radio silence” from Boston, Harrison added.
“We were building this budget absent some important information,” Dillon said. “If [the governor] makes dramatic changes there, then that will ripple through the budget. This net assessment could dramatically change one way or the other.”
Given the focus on and criticism of the district this past year, particularly during a controversial high school renovation debate, the number of empty seats in the Middle School auditorium for this budget presentation was surprising. Apart from town or school officials and staff, along with three members of the press, not even a full hand of residents could be counted, though it is possible many watched from their living rooms on the local CTSBTV.
Housatonic resident Michelle Loubert braved the cold, however, and asked whether eliminating more clerical-type positions, or merging positions rather than cutting educators, had been entertained.
Housatonic resident and school critic Michelle Loubert.
Dillon said the committee had analyzed what was necessary for the economical functioning of the district in “fine detail.”
“The place is operating pretty much with a skeleton crew,” he added, and went on to explain how the loss of certain staff is not always a savings and that some seemingly unnecessary positions actually help the district save money and make it possible to effectively educate the children.
“We are very, very lean,” he observed.
“I personally feel…these cuts go too far,” said committee member Jason St. Peter. He said he thought the cuts might affect the “educational integrity of the district.”
School Committee member Richard Bradway said the budget represents the “cost of doing business.” But, he added, “If we don’t want to pay those costs of doing business then we need to change how we do business.” He said the more “difficult and time-consuming discussions about things like consolidation,” are “pushed down the road” to the extent that talking about these cuts are “easier to consume.”
“If we don’t see the writing on the wall,” Bradway said, “we’ll find ourselves in the same position next year, and we’ll be probably hearing about much more painful cuts.”
Frederick Clark said he agreed, and that budget was “unsustainable,” and that “if we think we can’t afford this and we can’t sustain this…then we need to look at how we do things differently.”
Harrison said that part of what is making the budget so unmanageable is that state-funding “is not keeping pace [with expenses].” Harrison cited a study by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education that determined that the Foundation Budget, the minimum the state determines is necessary to adequately educate children, is “underfunded by $1 billion.” Also, she pointed out, “in 2003, almost 19 percent of our budget was covered by Chapter 70 (state education money). Now it’s 11 percent.” She said the issue may be one the school committee and the towns want to try to do something about.
The state has its own budget problems, and the hits, it is said, are taken by those with less clout: “The irony is not lost on me that the amount we’re talking about cutting is almost exactly the same amount the state short-changed us this year on regional transportation,” Dillon said. An automatic cut to transportation reimbursements made by outgoing Gov. Deval Patrick underfunded the district by roughly $258,000 this year. The district, along with other regional school districts, may take legal action to recover that loss.
“I found this meeting to be incredibly depressing,” said Chuck Gillett, a Stockbridge Selectboard member who earlier had expressed concern about unfunded pension liabilities. “I didn’t think that I was going to see these kinds of cuts.” Gillett went on to say that his two grown daughters had been through Monument’s renowned art program, and both became art majors in college; one is now an architect, another the head of a high school art department in New Mexico. Without the program, he said, “I don’t know where they’d be today…I owe an enormous debt to the high school at that time.”
He said both the cut to the art teacher and the Early Kindergarten class to be “incredibly troubling,” and urged the committee to “put that $248,000 back into the budget. I don’t think this is a huge number. I don’t think we’re going backwards, and I think we ought to at least tread water if not go forward.”
“Going backwards to me is unacceptable,” he added.
“Ditto,” said Selectboard member Ed Abrahams. “I think you’ll find a lot of support for that. I don’t think you should be afraid to put forward a budget that actually pays for the education we need to give our kids.”
School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon, left, and Committee member Rich Bradway.
“You put [the cuts] back in you have a no from me…I can’t afford it,” Loubert said, noting the burden on Great Barrington taxpayers.
“It seemed a little dishonest to me,” Dohoney said, “but the measure of the effect on the Great Barrington taxpayer came up at every single meeting. That’s not fair, and that’s evidence of the flawed system that we’re working in.”
“Until the system changes,” said committee chair Stephen Bannon, “this was the best we could come up with.”
Great Barrington Finance Committee Chair Sharon Gregory, who earlier, along with Gillett had expressed concerns about unfunded liabilities, said she thought taxpayers might be willing to digest “short-term” bumps if the committee could present time-frames for things like consolidation, or other potential cost-saving measures, “about changing the way we do things.”
“It is the unanimous passionate position of, I think, this entire community that sharing costs and services and consolidation is what needs to happen,” Dohoney said. “But it involves a lot of forces so far beyond our control, a lot of hard work and a lot of luck.”
“The pie is the pie,” he added, “and we have to change it otherwise it’s going to keep getting cut up.”
A public hearing on the Berkshire Hills Regional School District budget is scheduled for Thursday February 26, in the Monument Valley Regional Middle School auditorium.
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