Northfield and Warwick will be voting at their respective town meetings on an amendment to the Pioneer Valley Regional School District agreement that would be the first large-scale restructuring of the School Committee since the agreement was adopted in 1991.
The amendment would reduce the School Committee from 12 members — three from each of the four member towns — to a total of seven: two from Northfield and Bernardston each, one from Leyden and Warwick each, and one “at-large” member who can come from any of the four towns. The amendment would also impose on committee members a term limit of 12 consecutive years, and restrict employees of the district from serving on the committee at all.
“Being on the School Committee for the last three-and-a-half years has given me some insight,” said Deb Gilbert, a Bernardston resident and School Committee member who wrote and proposed the amendment. “I approached this as a concerned citizen, a resident of Bernardston, a taxpayer and a registered voter.”
Gilbert explained the rationale for the changes she proposed: “It’s just a given, I think, when you have a large number of people with varying ideas and varying start points of when they came onto the board (the committee), it’s really hard to get things accomplished because there’s the old school and the new school. Years ago, it was just reading and writing and math. Now, there’s a whole gamut of things.”
But in order for the amendment to be adopted, it has to be approved by at least three of the four member towns. The Leyden Selectboard decided against including the proposed amendment as an article on the warrant for Leyden’s May 19 Annual Town Meeting, due to Selectboard members’ opinion that Gilbert had not followed the district agreement’s proscribed procedure for proposing an amendment.
“Any warrant article (to change the school district agreement) that is passed in any of the towns would not be binding, in our opinion, to the town of Leyden (due to the allegedly incorrect procedure),” Leyden Selectboard Chairman Lance Fritz told the School Committee April 26.
The only town of the four that has not yet published a warrant for its town election is Bernardston. Bernardston Town Coordinator Hugh Campbell said that the Selectboard’s opinion is that the amendment is potentially too cumbersome to vote on as a single warrant article, as it changes multiple elements of the agreement, and perhaps would be more feasible if it were divided into multiple smaller amendment proposals.
However, Campbell added that the Selectboard still has time to reconsider its position, and may revisit the question after Northfield and Warwick have their town meetings, both of which are scheduled for this Monday.
“If nothing else, it brings it to light and people can talk about it,” Gilbert said. “I think a discussion needs to be had, at the very least. Change is not always bad.”
Contact Max Marcus at
413-772-0261, ext. 261, or
mmarcus@recorder.com