HUNTINGTON – No one likes to be at a meeting on a Friday night, but members of the Gateway Towns Advisory Committee, along with dozens of hilltown residents, gathered at the Town of Huntington’s Stanton Hall to discuss the GTAC’s plan regarding a bill that would allow the Town of Worthington to unilaterally withdraw from the Gateway Regional School District.
“We’re at kind of a critical point tonight, as the bill is now on the Governor’s desk,” said Russell’s Derrick Mason of the GTAC committee, before segueing to Dan Jacques, a Montgomery selectman.
“Unfortunately, the Governor doesn’t sound like he is up to speed yet (on the bill),” Jacques said, referring to an article that appeared in The Westfield News earlier that day. “I called the Governor’s office to get some insight, and they explained the process a little bit. The Governor has staff that will take a bill that comes in, do research, provide background information, take phone calls, emails, and then present the Governor with some package of information.”
He added that the Governor’s staff may even make recommendations in addition to providing insight.
“They (his staff) are getting inundated with phone calls and emails from different people,” Jacques said, stating that GTAC sent information to the Governor, including the original letter they sent to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “We essentially laid out that the bill was crafted to serve one town when it in fact impacts seven towns.”
“The bill was filed as a home rule petition, which usually address the problems and needs of one town’s charter. Technically speaking, a home rule petition shouldn’t be used to do things that effect other towns,” he said. “Because it’s a home rule petition, it gets treated with a certain type of deference.”
Jacques urged hilltowners to continue lobbying Patrick’s office, and said that, should the bill pass, it now contains checks and balances to ease the sting of a Worthington’s withdrawal.
“Don’t stop calling, because the Governor has to sign this by May 8,” he said.
“Underlying all of this is a question of funding,” said Middlefield’s Joe Kearns, another GTAC committee member. “This is a problem for the towns, because when the state balances their budget, we’re way out of the center part of the deal.”
“The issues out here are PILOT money – payment in lieu of taxes – roads and Chapter 90 funds, and education, and we have suffered in the amount of money that has come back from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the last several years,” he said. “If there was more money available, I don’t think we’d be here talking about this, because we’d have found some other avenues to follow.”
He also brought up another issue that has gone mostly unmentioned.
“I think a lot of times we reduce it just to dollars, but we don’t take the social components,” Kearns said. ” I don’t think it’s good for young people to be tossed around from one school to another, wondering whats going on. Continuity is very important in education.”
“This isn’t just a problem here. There are lots of other regional school districts that do have problems, and everyone is different,” he said. “But if this happens, a lot of things will happen down the road. If this town was able to break out of a regional school district, other towns will want to do the same thing.”
“If the Governor vetoes it, it will go back to the legislature, and then they could do an override. It doesn’t necessarily die on the Governor’s desk,” Mason said before touching base on what Kearns referred to as a ‘cascading effect’ on the district. “We need to be aware that a couple of the towns that are being represented tonight have whispered about the possibility of withdrawing from the district or even getting forced into bankruptcy.”
“This could essentially lead to the disintegration of the entire school district,” he said. “We’re hoping that as many people as can do this will contact the Governor’s office with talking points and mention whatever other concerns they may have. Do you have students in school that you’re worried about what this will do to them? To their educational experience?”
“Theres three things that can happen – he can sign it, after which it’d become law, he can veto it, and it would go back to House and Senate, at which case our work is still not done, or he can do nothing,” GTAC and Huntington Finance Committee member Darlene McVeigh said, adding that the latter decision may quite possibly be the worst of the three. “Unfortunately, if the Governor does nothing, it automatically becomes law. I just wanted to remind you folks that doing nothing isn’t really helping us.”
