BUCKLAND — Members of the Two Districts, Eight Towns (2D8T) Steering Committee are leaning toward keeping the name Mohawk Trail in the event that the Mohawk Trail and Hawlemont regional school districts merge.
The committee considered naming options during initial discussions about a new regional agreement on Thursday. Jake Eberwein, a project manager with consultant Berkshire Educational Resources K-12 (BERK12), said committee members have options in terms of what to name a new regional district, including retaining the name of one of the existing districts, blending the two names together or coming up with something new.
“You are forming a new district and that is different than one district absorbing the other,” Eberwein said. “There’s some symbolism. … This idea that we’re starting something new, there’s something to it.”
The committee made no final decisions, but members said they would prefer to keep Mohawk Trail as the name, to limit the number of changes voters would be presented with.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea of creating something new, and that method may be attractive to Hawley and Charlemont,” said Martha Thurber, co-chair of the 2D8T Steering Committee and chair of the Mohawk Trail School Committee. “I just worry that that is one more non-essential thing that we could do that’s going to make people say ‘no.'”
Thurber said she wants to keep changes to a minimum and that every proposed change could be one more reason for voters to reject the proposed merger.
“I go back to, how many reasons can we give people to vote this down, and that seems to be a reason to vote it down,” Thurber said.
Committee members echoed Thurber’s sentiments and said they lean toward keeping the name Mohawk Trail for the new consolidated district.
“I would kinda agree to keep it Mohawk Trail,” said Kenneth Bertsch, chair of the Hawlemont School Committee.
In addition to the new district’s name, committee members began to consider how it should be governed and what a new school committee would look like, how many members it should have and how voting should be weighed.
Eberwein said the district could opt to have one school committee representative per town, two or three, or base the number of representatives each town has on its population. There are also different options for how to structure committee votes, including one vote per member or weighted votes in which larger towns have more voting power.
Buckland representative Paula Consolo, who serves on the Buckland Finance Committee, asked how votes are currently structured and if votes could be weighted based on how much each town contributes to the school budget.
“I don’t think voting should be connected to money,” Eberwein said. “It’s not how our democracy works. If we do have weights, it should be based on population sizes.”
Currently, the Hawlemont School Committee has three representatives for each town, and each member gets one vote. The Mohawk Trail School Committee has two members for each town, and members’ votes are weighted based on population.
“I think it’s going to be hard to go to one member per town, and we certainly wouldn’t want to go to three members. I think two’s going to turn out to be the right number,” Bertsch said. “I think 16 [members] should be doable.”
Committee members did not make any decisions on how they wish the new school committee to be structured. Members did say that if the committee is too large, it could lead to unwieldy meetings and challenges in finding people to run for seats.
The committee will continue to work on the regional agreement in the coming months, and BERK12 is hoping to hold a community workshop sometime in April to bring together parents, guardians and other community members to discuss work on educational visioning for the proposed district.