HUNTINGTON – Following the signing of a bill enabling the Town of Worthington to withdraw from the Gateway Regional School District last week, residents of the six remaining district communities must now move forward.
This process will begin tonight, when the GRSD School Committee will hold it’s first meeting since Gov. Deval L. Patrick signed the bill.
School Committee Chair Gretchen Eliason said Monday that she doesn’t know which direction the committee will take regarding an education plan going forward.
“I don’t think we’ll have decisions made on Wednesday, but we’re going to start the process,” she said.
Eliason is a Worthington resident, and when asked if she and the committee’s other Worthington resident, Sue Levreault, would be involved in the education plan for the remaining Gateway communities, Eliason believes they’ll still have their say.
“I think we’ll be involved in the plan,” she said. “We don’t have any private interests that would necessitate us recusing ourselves. There is a seperate group in Worthington, an ad-hoc committee that Sue and I aren’t on.”
Eliason said that this committee will put in motion a plan to elect a new, local school committee.
“I don’t know what their plans will be yet. I know they’re talking now, but for awhile we may have two seperate school committees (Gateway and Worthington),” she said. “Sue and I will be representing the town in the Gateway district, and a separate group that will start thinking about how the local school district will be run.”
Eliason said that she is unsure how the two committees will interact, but that neither she nor Levreault have been approached about possibly serving as a liasion between the two committees.
“No one has approached us with that idea,” Eliason said, adding that Worthington residents are still very adamant in their pursuit of a withdrawal. “I haven’t heard from anyone that they opposed it. Unfortunately, I missed the Worthington town meeting a couple of years ago when they had the vote about seperating. So I’m not sure if it was completely or nearly unanimous.”
“We’re not all the way there yet. The only thing dry is the Governor’s signature,” said Ruth Kennedy of Russell. “This won’t become enacted for another 60 to 90 days. There are still a few things left to be done. We’re looking at quite a few months ahead of us.”
“Just follow what you’ve got to do, and we’ll do what we have to do, and we’ll figure it out from there,” she said yesterday. “I don’t know whats going to happen from here. At the meeting tomorrow night, I know there is a lot of stuff that has got to happen.”
Kennedy said that Worthington has not yet officially withdrawn from the Gateway Regional district, and that the legislation is merely a “request to withdraw.”
“It’s just permission to withdraw. That’s all it was,” she said. “Not everyone in Worthington is on board with this. You don’t have 100 percent.”
“There are so many questions on the table right now – we don’t have the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, or the how yet,” she said. “There has been figures tossed out, but we don’t know how much. We haven’t worked it out, the education, the split-up.”
“If this is really real, we may not have a Gateway system,” Kennedy said. “Because if any one of the six towns left withdraws, my gut says Gateway won’t exist anymore, because five towns cant’t pay for the system the way it is now.”
Kennedy said that she will be suggesting the creation of a subcommittee to discuss the ongoing situation to come up with solutions to the conflicts between the district and Worthington.
