Annual town meetings will be upon us shortly and, in addition to all of the town warrants, there will be two education articles for your consideration. The first relates to the approval of town assessments for educating our children at Gateway. Based upon the approved district budget and anticipated revenue, each town will be voting on an assessment amount that is 1.97% higher than for the current year. As with this past year, the 1.97% increase in assessments is based upon the alternative assessment method that the towns approved last year. You may recall that this method has been determined to help towns better anticipate and plan for expenditures for Gateway, does not penalize any town when new families with young children move into town, and is an insurance policy against large ‘spikes’ in town assessments from either changes in the number of students or the state’s process of determining minimum contributions from towns. As you’ll see on the town warrant, this year’s school budget vote is similar to last year’s, with just one vote on the school budget (as opposed to what some towns did in the past with three warrant articles on the budget).
The second warrant article relates to towns approving the amended regional agreement for the Gateway Regional School District. As mentioned above, we voted the first change last year to establish the new alternative assessment method. The state approved us making that change on the condition that we resolve the other issues that were either out of compliance or simply outdated in our regional agreement. You can see all of the changes in a ‘redlined’ copy of the agreement that is posted on the Gateway website (under the school committee tab on the Regional Amendment link).
While there are a number of changes, many of these simply eliminate outdated amendments (such as when a town entered the district), others reflect updates to comply with new laws and regulations, and others bring us into compliance with federal statutes. The most significant change is in the composition and voting procedure for the school committee, which has been out of compliance with “one man, one vote” for many years. Town and school officials, who spent much time collaborating on these changes over the past year, decided that the best option we could put forward should result in the smallest change to the school committee. To that end, the committee does not change in numbers of seats or how they are elected. Thus each town still has the ability to elect their own school committee members (rather than the district wide voting options discussed in the past) and each town keeps the same number of school committee members (Blandford 2; Chester 3; Huntington 3; Middlefield 2; Montgomery 2; and Russell 3). The change is that each member will now have a weighted vote that is based on town census numbers (updated every five years). To ensure fairness between the towns, a quorum is also newly defined as having at least 4 towns represented by a school committee member as well as a majority of the weighted vote attending. As with every change that is being recommended to the towns, these items were all approved unanimously by town and school officials at meetings to update the regional agreement (and every town was represented by at least one official at these meetings).
This process followed state procedures with the school committee appointing the Facilitated Discussion Group (led by consultants from the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools) as the group tasked with updating the regional agreement. As this group worked through potential changes, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was kept apprised and provided input as well. The proposed revised regional agreement was then presented to the school committee on March 13, where they unanimously voted to accept the changes and move them forward to the towns. Selectboards were given the changed document prior to the school committee vote so that they could have their Town Counsel review the changes and the school committee also had Gateway’s legal counsel review the changes. At this time, no legal issues have been raised that we’ve been made aware of regarding the revised regional agreement. Both town and school officials have offered to meet with individual towns to review the changes.
Given the openness and collaboration between the towns and schools on both the budget and the revised regional agreement, the amount of information that has been distributed to the towns and is available on line to residents, and the steady progress on these items, we’re hopeful that the towns will approve these two school related items at their Annual Town Meetings this spring.
