On Thursday, the School Committee held its annual public hearing on the budget. In year s past, that has been the night the panel votes to approve the spending plan it will send to member towns Lanesborough and Williamstown with the property tax assessments voters will consider at their respective annual town meetings. I m going to keep on saying draft, draft, draft all night long because this is a work in progress, Business Administrator Joe Bergeron said in presenting the budget to the board. As recently as March 3, the district told the Williamstown Finance Committee that it would be ready with final budget numbers for the Fin Comm to review at its March 17 meeting.
Those were two of the takeaways from a presentation to the town s Finance Committee on Wednesday. Mount Greylock Superintendent Jason McCandless and Business Manager Joe Bergeron met virtually with the town panel not to discuss specifics of the FY22 budget the district is formulating but to discuss some of the inputs that help build that budget. Bergeron did not provide any specifics about the planned budget for the three-school district or its impact to property taxpayers in Lanesborough and Williamstown. He said those numbers would not be finalized until next week when the School Committee holds its annual public hearing on the budget.
WILLIAMSTOWN â The Zoom âbombâ that disrupted a classroom and shocked the Mount Greylock Regional School community Jan. 21 was instigated by two students in another school district. According to Superintendent Jason âJakeâ McCandless, they were students of color.
McCandless, in reporting the results of the investigation during a Mount Greylock Regional School Committee remote meeting Thursday evening, noted that whatever the motivation of perpetrators, it is the perception of the victims that matters.
At the time, that perception was that it was a racial attack and caused shock and pain for the victim, whose log-in was used to enter the remote classroom, and who felt the racial epithets used during a song that was broadcast to the class in the unauthorized Zoom intrusion (known as a âbombâ) were directed at him.
The committee s Finance Subcommittee last week took a first pass at the value engineering list of items that were included in the first version of the project to go out to bid in 2019. The subcommittee made plans to discuss the value engineering list again on the afternoon of Jan. 14 before the topic goes to the full committee for final decisions later that evening. The school district s architects from Perkins Eastman and Traverse Landscape Architects compiled the value engineering list and plan to participate in next Thursday s discussions at the subcommittee and School Committee level, Business Manager Joe Bergeron told the subcommittee on Thursday afternoon.
Last week, the School Committee took some time to look at the difficulties the district will face in the next 10 to 20 years. First-year Superintendent Jason McCandless used the opportunity of an often routine report on enrollment to talk about concerning long-term decline in student population that the two-town district can foresee over the next couple of decades. He pointed to projections from the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission that show the district s enrollment falling to 783 students, kindergarten through 12th grade, by 2030. That would be a loss of 296, or 27 percent of the current K-12 population of 1,079. McCandless said the BRPC has a good track record for predicting such population trends, and that the district needs to start thinking about what those impacts will be.