NORTHFIELD — Contested seats on the Pioneer Valley Regional School Committee have gone to Mike Townsley and Jeanne Milton from Bernardston and Kristen Gonzalez from Northfield.
Four other positions were uncontested, two each from Leyden and Warwick. Leyden’s new committee members are Abigail Pratt and Karen O’Neil. In Warwick, Susan O’Reilly-McRae was re-elected, and Jessica Marshall will be appointed to a position that no one ran for.
School Committee members are elected by residents of all four towns of the district, regardless of which town each position is associated with. Of the candidates for Bernardston’s two open seats, Townsley got 1,730 votes; Milton, who was running for re-election, got 1,446; Aaron Gerry got 1,312. For Northfield’s one open seat, Gonzalez got 1,472 votes; Martha Parker got 1,039.
In total the election brought five new members into the 12-member School Committee. All the new positions are four-year terms, except Marshall’s which is two years.
Lately the committee’s work has been more intense than usual. In May, the district discovered a financial deficit that, at the time, was estimated to be between $1 and $2 million.
In the months since, as the new superintendent, Jon Scagel, and Finance Director Tanya Gaylord have gotten their hands around the district’s finances, it’s turned out that the situation is not quite so bad: by Gaylord’s most recent estimate, the deficit is $546,000.
How deeply the district will go into debt and how long it will take to pay it off are to be determined. But with the district’s financial situation less dire than was thought, Gaylord has suggested that the amount to borrow will be far less than originally expected.
“I’d like to see us borrow very minimally, if at all,” Gaylord said.
“Routine management of our district is going to be easier to handle than the crisis we’ve been in,” O’Reilly-McRae told the new committee members and district residents at a candidates forum last week.
Inevitably, the new committee will have to deal with restructuring the district, which will likely include closing schools and combining certain administrative roles with a neighboring district. That work will be informed by recommendations from the inter-town HEART Committee (Honest Education and Retaining Trust), which is working with consultants on a study of the district’s financial sustainability.
Also on the HEART Committee’s plate is a re-writing of the district agreement that governs the School Committee’s involvement with the towns. HEART Committee members hope to have the new agreement ready for the towns to vote on at their spring town meetings. If the new agreement goes through, it will allow the School Committee to close schools this summer at the earliest.
The new School Committee will also be working to improve the committee’s relationship with town officials. At the beginning of October, members of the selectboards and finance committees from the three towns other than Warwick signed a letter asking the School Committee to choose a new chairperson after the November election.
Per their request, votes for a chair and vice chair are on the School Committee’s agenda for today.
Contact Max Marcus
at 413-772-0261 ex 261
or mmarcus@recorder.com.