GREENFIELD — The School Committee is seeking residents to serve on a new advisory committee tasked with developing a long-term plan for facilities use — an effort that is intended to build upon the work of a now-disbanded subcommittee.
The committee has dissolved the Redistricting and Reorganizing Ad Hoc Subcommittee and replaced it with a Long-term Facilities Use Advisory Committee. School Committee Chair Stacy Sexton said the facilities plan that the advisory committee is tasked with creating will need to take into account “best educational practices and the needs of Greenfield Public Schools students and staff; long-term enrollment projections and facilities needs projections; [and] the long-term fiscal outlook of the city of Greenfield.”
The plan will outline “the best distribution of grades across buildings; any recommended building closures or building construction, and a proposed timeline for the same; [and] potential pathways toward regionalization,” according to Sexton.
“I’m really interested in making sure that any option that we have is given serious consideration; that we do our due diligence,” Sexton told committee members last week. “We do deliberation and that the decisions that we’re making are both grounded in current feeling and sentiment as well as long-term, actual, real projections.”
Committee member Elizabeth DeNeeve suggested that part of the advisory committee’s work include looking at what other districts have done. She mentioned that, while Greenfield is not considered a rural district by the state, it faces similar challenges with declining enrollment.
“I think that the ad hoc was a good start, but now we need to look at all of the different options that are out there. I mean, so many people are having conversations about buildings and declining enrollment,” DeNeeve said.
She added that the Redistricting and Reorganizing Ad Hoc Subcommittee was one of the longest-running subcommittees and had previously done a lot of public outreach work, and the results and information collected should be considered by the new advisory committee.
Sexton said they envision the new committee as building upon the work of the old one, and that by making it an advisory committee, it could include members of the public as well as School Committee members.
“Part of what I wrote in the creation of this is that we would use the information generated from the prior Redistricting and Reorganizing Subcommittee as a starting point and assess from there what additional information we might need in order to help us make decisions,” Sexton said.
Sexton recommended that themself and members DeNeeve and Melissa McKenzie Webb serve on the new advisory committee, as they were part of the Redistricting and Reorganizing Ad Hoc Subcommittee prior to it being dissolved. The advisory committee will have an additional 10 members representing students, parents, staff and general community members.
The advisory committee intends to work on its draft long-term facilities plan for a year and present it to the full School Committee next May.
“There is a deadline that I’ve put in here of next May … to give us about a year to do the study, get the information, talk with people, get real work done, have a recommendation to come before the fuller body about what are we doing. What is our long-term vision? Are there any big choices that we need to make?” Sexton said. “Then it would be sort of on us from there to take that recommendation, take any votes that we need to and proceed.”
Advisory committee on literacy
The committee also plans to create a separate advisory committee at its next meeting in May, specifically to look at the current state of literacy in the school district and what can be done to improve literacy rates in the schools.
“It is clearly one of the most important things that we can be doing right now to prepare our students,” member Jeffrey Diteman said.
Earlier in the meeting, when the committee heard reports from principals of Federal Street School, Newton School and the Academy of Early Learning, the principals shared that improving literacy is a big goal at the schools.
Kelly Halpin, principal at Federal Street School, said the school had met 83% of the improvement targets set by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in 2025, and that improving literacy continues to be an area of focus.
“In 2025, we exceeded every math target. For our growth targets, we exceeded the typical growth for our peers across the state. And for chronic absenteeism, we exceeded every target set for us,” Halpin said. “It did reveal some opportunity for growth and that, specifically, is our English language arts and literacy.”
Halpin said the school is working to implement more early literacy diagnostic assessments and small group instruction to improve literacy.
Academy of Early Learning Principal Jill Taglia said the preschool is working with DESE to explore new curriculums to bolster student literacy and collect data.
“We’ve been working all year long to look at different high-quality instructional materials, especially focused on literacy,” Taglia said.
Sexton asked Diteman and School Committee member Melodie Goodwin to bring the topic of a literacy advisory committee back to the full committee in May, after they have written an action plan outlining specific goals and timelines.
