NORTHFIELD — With town officials asking for better communication from the Pioneer Valley Regional School Committee, and several other local groups becoming increasingly involved in the committee’s work, new Chairwoman Sue O’Reilly-McRae hopes to coordinate the many moving parts of the district’s governance.
The School Committee unanimously voted O’Reilly-McRae to be chair on Nov. 8, the first meeting following the Nov. 6 election, which brought five new members into the 12-member committee. The School Committee’s former chair, Pat Shearer, was made vice-chair.
The change of leadership was made at the request of the member towns’ selectboards and finance committees, who had met at the beginning of October to discuss taking a more active role in the School Committee’s work, particularly in its fiscal planning. New leadership was seen as a way of breaking old habits.
O’Reilly-McRae has been on the School Committee since April 2017, when she was appointed to fill a vacancy in Warwick’s membership. She has been on the inter-town HEART Committee (Honest Education and Retaining Trust) since it began in the spring of 2017, and was recently made that group’s official correspondent to the School Committee. As one of Warwick’s School Committee members, she is also on Warwick’s recently formed advisory committee to the School Committee.
“I see my position as supporting communication between all those committees,” O’Reilly-McRae said.
Knowledge of the HEART Committee will be especially critical when the School Committee begins to act on the HEART Committee’s recommendations this spring. The HEART Committee is now in the midst of a study of the district’s financial sustainability and a rewriting of the district agreement that delineates the School Committee’s responsibilities and the towns’ interactions with the school system. The HEART Committee expects to have a new district agreement complete in time for the towns to approve it, or not, at their respective spring town meetings.
Among the changes in the new district agreement will be a clear protocol for closing schools. This ties into the financial sustainability study, which will include data on the individual schools of the district that will inform the School Committee’s decisions in restructuring the district. If the new agreement is approved this spring, it would allow the School Committee to close schools this summer if necessary.
The HEART Committee’s study also looks at the potential for sharing administrative roles with neighboring districts. O’Reilly-McRae said that a “shared services” model may be more feasible for certain roles than for others, but pointed out that it is basically analogous to Pioneer combining its football program with Turners Falls’ this year.
At the end of October, the state department of education officially became involved in Pioneer’s finances via an overseer who must approve all financial decisions. This summer, after the district’s financial deficit was discovered, officials from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Revenue emphasized the need for the district to address its structural financial issues — yet maintained that major decisions, like school closures, should be made by the community.
“They’ve made it clear for us that if we don’t take responsibility for those decisions, they will,” O’Reilly-McRae said. “We’re going to have to be willing to explore a lot of options.”
Contact Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261 ex 261.