Dr. David Hopson
Despite being only a weekly newspaper, the Country Journal is often full of interesting and informative articles and letters to the editor. Even with a potential week’s delay between news being made and then reported, I am still amazed at how much I can learn from this informative paper. Imagine my surprise, then, in reading the July 31 issue to learn that the Town of Russell had questions regarding the elementary consolidation process, including whether the district had notified the town about the consolidation process (or had followed a process at all) when no one – at the Gateway district offices, the chair and vice chair of the school committee, or the district’s legal counsel – had been asked for information by anyone from the town of Russell.
I understand that it has been four years since the consolidation and that there have been changes in town and school committee representatives, meaning that it is possible that we now have people in official positions who were not directly involved in the consolidation process. To help explain the process to newer officials, I shared some information directly with the Town of Russell’s Selectboard as well as with the school committee. Much of the information I shared is also freely available to anyone with access to the Internet, as all of the information on the consolidation process is still online on the district’s website. This includes the process, public hearing comments, financial analysis, letters to and from various organizations, and related research information.
In short, the towns were notified of and were involved in the process of consolidating elementary schools. A number of state agencies were also involved in defining and outlining the process of consolidating elementary schools and returning each unused building back to their town by ending the lease arrangements (each of the impacted buildings already belonged to their respective town). In fact, the wording of the motion taken by the school committee was provided by the Massachusetts School Building Authority to ensure that we covered the entire legal basis for this action. The motion (as in official school committee meeting minutes) was “Mr. Damon made a motion seconded by Mrs. Jensen to vote that the school committee close Blandford, Russell and Conwell Elementary Schools, returning each town owned building to their respective towns and not submit a reorganization plan to the Massachusetts’ School Building Authority thereby forfeiting MSBA grant funding and certifying that the school committee acknowledges and agrees that MSBA will be recouping funds from the district in the amount of $4,587,165 in annual payments of $327,655 for the next 14 years.”
While this was a difficult process to undertake, and still has ramifications today (i.e., the effort of Worthington to withdraw from the district), the bottom line is that the consolidation met the goals of providing a better education for our students and saving the district money. We do not have multi-age classrooms, our students have more time devoted to special subjects, and our teachers are better able to collaborate than they were before the consolidation. As to savings, the Worthington ad-hoc committee’s estimated cost of reopening just one elementary school is almost equal to the cost of running the three schools that closed four years ago – certainly showing that we’ve avoided many expenses over these past few years. Yet we’re still facing struggles with towns passing the Gateway Budget despite having a projected budget lower than it was five years ago. I believe we can avoid such misunderstandings about the district if town officials posed their questions directly to district officials rather than going through the media.
