LEYDEN — The subject of school regionalization inspired spirited debate between Pioneer Valley Regional School District officials, Leyden residents and regionalization leaders during a three-hour education forum this week.
Tuesday’s forum featured guest speakers from across the region to share information on the challenges facing rural school districts, along with updates from Franklin County Technical School about its ongoing new building project, accomplishments within the Pioneer Valley Regional School District and regionalization from the Six Town Regionalization Planning Board.
“I want to thank everyone, all of the speakers, for coming and really putting in the work so that you can help Leyden with these very complicated issues,” Leyden Selectboard Chair Erica Jensen said at the start of the forum.
The program began with Linda Dunlavy, executive director of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG), and Doug Selwyn, a longtime educator from Greenfield who now chairs the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. Dunlavy discussed the findings of the 2022 Special Commission on Rural School Districts‘ report that highlighted both the issues facing Franklin County education, like insufficient state funding and declining enrollment, and possible remedies. Selwyn shared a presentation on the Chapter 70 funding formula, demonstrating how less enrollment equates to less state funding under the current system.
Despite the general overview of education in Franklin County, the subject of regionalization between the Pioneer Valley and Gill-Montague regional school districts inspired the majority of questions and discussions from those in attendance.
The proposed “super district” seeks to merge Bernardston, Gill, Leyden, Montague, Northfield and Warwick into one school district, to potentially be called the Great River Regional School District. High school students from these towns would be educated at the existing Turners Falls High School and Great Falls Middle School, middle schoolers would occupy Pioneer Valley Regional School and elementary students would remain in their current buildings. This is the final stretch before Leyden, Bernardston, Northfield, Warwick and Gill will each have a November Special Town Meeting vote, and Montague will have a ballot question on a regional agreement for a new combined district.
This six-year effort by the Six Town Regionalization Planning Board has reached the public information stage, where members are traveling to the six towns to discuss the research done on the feasibility of regionalization.
Greg Snedeker, vice chair of the Planning Board, led the presentation, explaining that “structural declines” have continued since the 1990s in the context of student enrollment at both Pioneer and Gill-Montague, coupled with a decline in families with school-age children and a lack of housing for young families to move into.
Pioneer Superintendent Patricia Kinsella had asked whether the new town assessment projections from The Abrahams Group are inclusive of the significant pay bumps secured for Pioneer educators in 2024. The contract is in effect through fiscal year 2027.
“In November 2023, Gill-Montague had a slightly higher salary rate for teachers than Pioneer. In 2024, Pioneer settled two contract agreements, one with our support personnel and one with our teachers,” Kinsella said. “I realized in doing my due diligence in the past couple of weeks that it looked like the Six Town folks never reanalyzed the potential costs, even though Pioneer teachers are now making, in some cases, quite a bit more than Gill-Montague teachers.”
At a previous meeting on Sept. 25, Genovese said he understood that new salary information from Pioneer had been included when Kinsella first inquired, but that he would double-check. He reached out to The Abrahams Group.
When the group confirmed this was not the case, he contacted both Kinsella and Gill-Montague interim Superintendent Tari Thomas the next day seeking updated teacher salary data. These numbers are now being rerun to produce new assessment projections and results are expected to be available within the next three weeks.
In the 2023 analysis by The Abrahams Group, the projected assessment data uses the Gill-Montague FY24 salaries, because salaries were higher than those of Pioneer until the collective bargaining was completed in 2024.
“We’re having the consultants go, come back to the drawing board, because that’s really important information,” Genovese said on Tuesday.
The Abrahams Group scoped out 10 possible models for calculating town assessments, and the preferred model uses a five-year rolling average of foundation enrollment. This model reduces fluctuations in cost to the towns, along with other operating cost data.
“What we were trying to do was to determine whether the method that we use, which was the foundation enrollment being averaged over time, was the correct way to put it in our regional agreement,” Planning Board Chair Alan Genovese said at the Tuesday meeting.
Outside of the assessment clarification, Genovese and Snedeker stressed that the fundamental issue of declining enrollment remains, impacting the quality of education for students in the six towns. Concern about teachers being retained at a new regionalized district was still a point of contention.
“How many teachers are you going to fire?” resident Margaret Arroyo asked of the board. “They’re an integral part of who we are and raising our kids. So if we’re going to shut down these schools, we’re obviously going to lose people.”
Snedeker said the “efficiencies” come at the administrative level, not involving teachers.
“The efficiencies would come from central office, so you don’t have two superintendents and two business directors,” Snedeker explained. “There were no projections of laying off any teachers.”
To cut through some tension, Leyden Town Coordinator Michele Giarusso, who served on the original regionalization committee for Leyden, Warwick, Bernardston and Northfield, called the Honest Education and Retaining Trust (HEART) Committee, said the town is seeing less school-age children and young families are struggling to move to Leyden.
“We have got to think about economies of scale for the future, quality of life for all of us, quality education for the children,” she said. “We have so many things that we’re going to have to vote for in the coming years that I think we’d better all start working together.”
