On behalf of all of the district’s staff and students, I wish to thank everyone who took part in annual town meetings in the towns of Blandford, Middlefield, Russell, and Montgomery and supported the Gateway Budget. The budget was overwhelmingly approved in each town meaning that we now have a budget in place for the next school year. I urge people to also attend the remaining annual town meetings in Chester (Saturday June 11) and Huntington (Monday, June 6) to support both the schools and towns in this important annual event.
Passing the budget this early means that the district can now concentrate our limited resources on moving forward to meet our mission of providing an exemplary education rather than spending hours reworking budget documents that, as we saw this year, made little difference in the end when DESE set the operating budget for the 2015-2016 school year in December.
To briefly recap, while the FY’17 budget doesn’t ‘lay-off’ any staff, it does reduce staff through attrition (meaning not replacing some retiring staff). In addition, this budget has some significant changes to the district’s daily operations, especially a change in grade configurations that will take place when students return to school this August. You’ll recall that the current fourth graders will remain at Littleville and Chester Elementary Schools for fifth grade (and will be under the elementary administration) while we’ll reconfigure grades sixth through eighth into a middle school (under the leadership of the high school administration) while leaving high school as a ninth to twelfth grade. This also means that sixth through eighth grade students in the middle school will be on the same, earlier schedule as the high school students, while fifth grade students will remain on the elementary schedule. As discussed by Mr. Finnie and Mrs. Coburn at school committee meetings, these changes have some very positive impacts including one less transition between schools for our students.
I’ll also take this opportunity to remind everyone that the Gateway Class of 2016 will graduate on Friday, June 3rd (hopefully the weather will cooperate and this will be held on Booster Field). It’s certainly quite an accomplishment for these students who have spent so many years preparing themselves for leaving the K-12 educational environment and moving onto the next step in their lives. As with prior classes, the Class of 2016 has students moving onto the world of work, into many colleges and universities, and being well prepared to move into the ‘adult’ world. My thanks to the Class of 2016 for all they’ve contributed to Gateway over the years, to their families for supporting them in their educational endeavors, to our staff who have worked diligently to prepare these graduates for the ‘real world’, and of course to all of our member communities and residents who have helped finance their education.
If the successes of previous graduates are any indication, I suspect that we’ll see many in the Gateway Class of 2016 be very successful, contribute to their communities, and be engaged in making the world a better place for everyone. I believe that is the overall goal of public education as envisioned by so many and that this is a far cry from measuring student success through standardized tests that measure so little, are given so infrequently, and are statistically inaccurate at measuring success in life.
