WARWICK — Town officials think they’ve found a way to undermine a contract with Pioneer Valley Regional School District Superintendent Jon Scagel that they see as inappropriately generous given the district’s financial situation.
The contract goes into effect at the start of the 2020 fiscal year this July, and guarantees Scagel five years, with annual 5 percent raises starting the second year.
The contract, signed in February, only required approval from the School Committee. It has since been thoroughly criticized by the selectboards and finance committees of the district’s four towns.
Now, Warwick’s Selectboard and Town Coordinator David Young (also on the School Committee, but who was not present at the contract-signing meeting, he emphasizes) are leading a charge to undermine the contract. Their strategy is to reject the school district’s budget requests for the upcoming school year. If they can get to July, when the new fiscal year starts, and Pioneer still hasn’t been able to finalize a budget for the year, they believe the superintendent’s contract might be put into jeopardy.
“We are blazing our own path here,” Young said.
Complaints about the contract have mostly targeted Pioneer’s financial situation. The district has been seeking ways to cut costs and increase revenue since last spring, when a $450,000 deficit was discovered.
Efforts to economize have resulted most notably in the closure of Leyden’s Pearl Rhodes Elementary School. Town selectboards and finance committees have urged the School Committee to consider merging to some extent with a neighboring school district, and there have been preliminary talks with the Gill-Montague Regional School District. Young called the five-year contract a “blocking move” by the Pioneer School Committee against any significant merger.
A second point has been that this is Scagel’s first superintendent job, and that he’d been in the position for less than a year when the new contract was signed.
Scagel, for his part, declined to reconsider the contract, former committee Chairwoman Sue O’Reilly-McRae told the Warwick Selectboard. O’Reilly-McRae stepped down from the chair position in March but is still on the committee.
The occasion for Warwick’s plan is the June 17 town meetings, specially scheduled by the four towns to vote on Pioneer’s 2019-2020 budget. The School Committee’s decision in March to close Pearl Rhodes pushed the committee’s financial planning past the deadline for the four annual town meetings, so town officials agreed to give the School Committee a few extra weeks by deferring on the budget until June.
A regional school district’s budget requires approval by two-thirds of the district’s member towns. So in Pioneer’s case, if two towns reject the budget in their town meetings, it fails. The Bernardston Selectboard has agreed to cooperate with Warwick.
On their June 17 warrants, Warwick and Bernardston have split their school costs into two separately votable articles: one amount for that town’s portion of the superintendent’s salary, and one amount for everything else.
Legally, Young said a town cannot cherrypick parts of the school budget to accept and parts to reject. The district gives each town an assessment — a flat, non-negotiable cost for that town’s share of the district. The only choice the town has is whether to accept or reject it.
So even if Warwick’s town meeting rejects only the superintendent’s salary but approves the rest of the assessment, in effect it will be rejecting the whole assessment, Young said.
The point, then, of splitting the assessment apart, Young said, is to make a point to the School Committee about what exactly the town dislikes about the budget.
What’s for sure at this point is that if both Warwick and Bernardston reject their assessments, Pioneer’s budget proposal fails, and there won’t be enough time before the start of the new fiscal year to approve a revised budget.
What happens then is, the state Department of Education will impose a budget on Pioneer on a month-by-month basis, calculated as one-twelfth of the prior year’s budget. This is kept up until the towns and schools are able to work out a plan on their own, at which point the state can step away.
Pioneer’s currently proposed budget for fiscal year 2020 is only $1,101 more than this year’s budget — $14,224,966 to this year’s $14,223,865. So a one-twelfth, month-by-month budget wouldn’t make a huge difference, School Budget Subcommittee Chairman Mike Townsley said, although it would affect the district’s ability to buy supplies in bulk.
But because that budget would be calculated from this year’s budget, and because this year’s budget does not include the superintendent’s new contract, such a situation might legally qualify as a failure to fund the contract. According to Young, there is legal precedent that a failure to fund a multi-year contract in its first year invalidates the whole thing.
If things do work out that way, and if Young is right about what it would do to Scagel’s contract, the towns and the school district will be in a stalemate until one side bends on the question of the contract.
What Young imagines is Scagel, “in his leadership capacity, deciding that, for the good of the district, he should listen to the will of the people,” and renegotiate.
And, Warwick Selectman Todd Dexter added, “If he wants to work for a community that can pay more, Orange may have a position open soon at a higher rate.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261 ex 261.