Gateway Regional School District Superintendent Dr. David B. Hopson.
This year’s process of developing a district budget with regular and ongoing input from town officials, along with a series of facilitated meetings with school officials, town officials and school committee members, has so far made this year’s annual town meetings very different. The process of developing and deliberating on budget choices started very early this year and many questions and concerns were answered and addressed from not only committee members but also from town officials. This information was then shared throughout the district in a much more one-to-one manner along with the usual press releases and posting information to the district’s website. Rather than trying to explain the school budget in just a few minutes at an annual town meeting, we now have both selectboard and finance committee members who can help explain the process, the requests, and the need for the budget numbers adopted by the school committee. Additionally this collaborative process has allowed town officials to support the budget request at each town’s ATM.
In addition to collaborating around the budget, these meetings have also resulted in two major changes. One change relates to an alternative assessment method and the second relates to launching a full-day preschool program next year. Both of these changes are the result of facilitated meetings that addressed a number of financial and sustainability issues from the perspective of both the towns and the school district. This process proved so successful that the participants decided to maintain the facilitated meetings next year to continue collaboratively working on the issues we’ve been discussing but also to expand the meetings and begin to work on changes to the regional agreement that are required by the state. I’m happy to report that the school committee voted this past week to support expanding the role of the facilitated discussion group to include making recommendations on changes to the regional agreement (because by law the school committee is the legal entity to move forward amendments to the regional agreement). In some ways, this is a continuation of the amendment to the agreement currently being voted on at ATM to provide an alternative assessment method. While there has been some discussion in the past regarding a five-year rolling assessment method, the participants in the facilitated discussion group took time to review different methods, reflect on which may work the best and then spent time refining that choice to best meet all of our member towns’ needs.
The result is an assessment method that will stabilize town assessments, eliminate the drastic swings in yearly assessments between towns, allow for towns to predict and plan for school assessments in the future and remove the ‘penalty’ of having families with children move into one of the towns (or of having families with school-aged children). Given that many of our towns have growing kindergarten enrollments and many properties on the real estate market, this change in assessment methodology is very timely in ensuring a gradual rise in assessments in the future. One only has to look at the assessment changes for towns over the last few years to see how a change in just a few children in our towns can greatly impact town assessments, to the point that some towns have seen double digit increases one year and yet see decreases in another year that in either case make developing a realistic budget over time very difficult. The resulting recommendation to change the regional agreement was made to the school committee and they promptly unanimously voted to support this.
Moving forward, the hope is that the facilitated discussion group can take a look at other facets of the regional agreement, work with the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools to consider potential changes, and together determine the best language for Gateway through a process of understanding the impact of potential changes, considering how these may impact all parties, and reaching an agreement on amendments to send to the school committee. If this works as well as the process to develop the new assessment amendment it would allow an opportunity for widespread understanding about the changes, a buy in from both town officials and the school committee, and a chance to pass needed changes at ATM without undue influence or pressure from the state.
