LENOX â The townâs public schools leaders are immersed in planning to join at least six other Berkshire County school districts and nearly 1,000 schools statewide in a state program of pool testing for COVID-19.
More than 300,000 Massachusetts students and school staffers in at least 200 of the stateâs 400 school districts are eligible for the program at their participating schools in the coming weeks.
Voluntary testing at no cost to families would be conducted weekly at the Lenox schools to detect possible infections among students and staff, interim Schools Superintendent William Cameron said. He hopes the program can be launched locally within the next two weeks, although many details remain to be ironed out.
Superintendent Barbara Malkas cautioned that this is still a preliminary budget and that there are still a lot of moving parts. This year it feels a little bit more predictable mainly because the governor did issue a budget on Jan. 27, she told the School Committee s finance subcommittee last week. So the timeline that by which we re going to know about funding will be better than it was last year. Business Administrator Carolyn Burnett explained during her presentation that the district is being held harmless in that it will not see a decrease in Chapter 70 education aid despite have a drop in enrollment.
iBerkshires.com reports the appropriation would be level-funded from this year at $17,769,074.
Superintendent Barbara Malkas cautioned that this is still a preliminary budget and that there are still a lot of moving parts.
Business Administrator Carolyn Burnett explained during her presentation that the district is being held harmless in that it will not see a decrease in Chapter 70 education aid despite have a drop in enrollment.
Both enrollment and best practices for capital planning will affect reimbursement rates and scope of any project undertaken. The city entered the eligibility phase for renovating or replacing Greylock Elementary School in December 2019. The process had been put on hold for some months but the building committee resumed its functions last fall. On Tuesday, the committee had a preview of the information to be discussed on Friday with MSBA officials. Final documents will be submitted by March 30. We need to make sure that the calculation for enrollment is based on our previous projections prior to the pandemic as opposed to through or during the pandemic, Superintendent of Schools Barbara Malkas said. She anticipated some back and forth questions from MSBA on Friday that may mean revisions to the current enrollment projection.
NORTH ADAMS â North Adams Public Schools will change its process for switching between hybrid and remote learning, after positivity rate calculations kept students remote for an extra week â even as regional virus levels were falling.
The previous agreement between the district and the North Adams Teachers Association had set a threshold of 3 percent for regional positivity rates, above which schools were required to operate remotely.
When it calculated that metric, the district weighed higher positivity rates in small towns the same as lower positivity rates in much larger municipalities.
That means the districtâs metric remained above the threshold in early February, keeping students remote at a time when the regionâs average positivity rate â if weighted to account for the total number of tests in each community â was actually below the 3-percent mark.