BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington           Stockbridge        West Stockbridge

 SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING

Meet & Confer

DISTRICT OFFICES- Stockbridge

May 19, 2016 – 7:00 p..m.

Present:

School Committee:   S. Bannon, R. Bradway, J. St. Peter, W. Fields, C. Shelton, A. Potter

Administration:        P. Dillon

 Staff/Public:   M. Berle, B. Doren, M. Young, S. Soule, J. Briggs, Eileen Mooney

Absent:    R. Dohoney, F. Clark,   K. Piasecki, D. Weston

List of Documents Distributed:

Booster Club Paid Positions; Children’s Program Description; HS annual report 15; May 19, 2016 Agenda – Meet _ Confer; Berkshire County Head Start MB expansion; Shared Service Agreement – BHRSD – SMSU

 RECORDER NOTE: Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed, after the fact, from DVD provided by CTSB. Length of meeting: 1hr 28min

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CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order @ 7:00pm _____________________________________________________________________________

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

The listing of agenda items are those reasonably anticipated by the chair, which may be discussed at the meeting. Not all items listed may in fact be discussed, and other items not listed may be brought up for discussion to the extent permitted by law. This meeting is being recorded by CTSB and will be broadcast at a later date. Minutes will be transcribed and made public, as well as added to our website, www.bhrsd.org once approved.

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Bannon, Chairman: Uncommon problem that we do not have a quorum of at least 6 members tonight (only 5 members at meeting). At Meet & Confer we typically don’t vote on anything, it’s more of a relaxed meeting but unfortunately tonight we had three votes to take and we cannot take those votes. First order of business tonight is to schedule a quick meeting for next week because there are some time sensitive things that people want votes on.

8pm meeting Thursday May 26, 2016 – need Quorum of 6 minimum to vote.

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MINUTES – None

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TREASURER’S REPORT -None

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SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT

Dillon:

Booster Club Paid Positions: Asked for at last meeting by W Fields. Six assistant coaches that are Booster Club funded and then there are two positions connected to the spring musical that are also Booster Club funded. That’s the total of booster club funded positions.

Children’s Program Description: P. Dillon: We’re going to hear a proposal from the Children’s Study Home and I’m formally recusing myself from this. There’s a potential conflict for me.  I spoke with Norm Alamat the Ethics Commission on May 11th about this and the reason I’m recusing myself is because my wife is involved with that proposal.

Bannon: I’ve asked Kate Burdsall to be the school district liaison to the Children’s Study Home and I and she’s accepted. She will report directly to me, as the Chairman. Peter will not be involved with this at all and we’ll meet the letter of the law.

CHILDREN’S STUDY HOME- Berkshire Mill Pond Campus Day School at former Eagleton School campus.

Eliza: I thought if it was important to share a little bit about our organization so that you have a sense of the broader breath and when we talk about the school. The Children’s Study Home is the oldest nonprofit in Western Massachusetts, it’s the second oldest nonprofit in the state of Massachusetts.  I think that’s important because you don’t get to do those things if you don’t do things well and if you’re not a flexible and accountable and part of a sense of community. (In the interest of time allotted, they provided an organization info packet to SC).

Dr. Joseph Dupelle, the educational director at the school: We have a program in Springfield called the Mill Pond School and currently that program runs for kids from kindergarten to age 22. We’re talking about doing something in the Berkshires that we’re pretty excited about. That’s going to k-8 program starting with k-8 and we’re looking at a day program, not a residential program to start.  In my mind it’s very important for kids to be with their families and not to be separated, if at all possible. We are going to take some of the current staff that we have in Springfield and bring them up and start the program up here and then we can train new staff that would need to come on board. I know the staff and they know how to do their job and they’re going to be able to do that best here in the classrooms. All kids will have to be on an IEP. We’re IEP driven and it’s funded through the local districts who have a need to send kids to a program of this nature we deal with kids who are on the spectrum, with kids with social emotional difficulties, with kids who are suffering a great deal trauma. It’s really important for us to try to find a way to reach these kids, give them a sense of align, give them some successes because no matter how hard we try we just can’t sometimes can’t do that. We don’t have the luxury of the intensive small groups. These classrooms will consist of a teacher, a professional and never ever more than eight kids, preferably a little bit less than that but never more than eight. There will be additional therapeutic staff on the ground that will provide support to the teachers. We’ll have school counselors.  This is a program we have up and running in Springfield right now and I’ve been doing I’ve been doing it therefore for three years, having left the public sector and now am in the private sector. We measure our success by how many kids we get back in your district and are successfully going back to the district and staying there.  Our goal is not to keep kids. I realize that they get funded and we get money for servicing them but our success is those kids that get to go back and be with their age level peers. We can’t duplicate what the public school does, especially if we get up into the high school level, with sports teams and clubs. The good news is there’s a lot of activities up in the Berkshires, like Shakespeare and Company and we could provide those kind of experiences to the kids because that’s a natural thing that’s already up here. We pay them to come down to our in the world us to provide support and they do a fabulous job with the kids. My goal is to take what already exists, what we’ve had success with, and duplicate that and put that in this environment in a day program.

Diane Dillon: I am very excited to be part of this project. I look forward to finding out more from other special ed directors and other superintendents from area neighboring communities about what would be programs and services that would best meet the needs of the kids in the community. It’s particularly exciting for me to get to join the project at this stage. I had the privilege of starting a school when we lived in New York City, I was a founding faculty member of the school at Columbia University where I was part of a team that helped put together the curriculum and the entire thing for a year before the doors open in a k-8 school. I already can envision using so many of those evidence-informed practices and strategies that work best in there and seeing how we can implement

Q&A:

Bradway: In the document that we received, you say that students are generally average or above-average intelligence but experience difficulty in social emotional behavior areas. At a lower age that might be hard to perceive as being a problem in a public school because if they’re above average they might be meeting the expectations of what the public school systems looking for so I’m just curious what are the factors that might bring a child and a family to your school?

Dr. Joseph Dupelle: What’s happening is that number of the kids are grade level appropriate and some above grade level, but their behavior is at such a level where they’re unable to function in a classroom environment because they’re not able to make the right choices. A lot of those things occurred whether it’s some sort of trauma that’s occurred or some sort of experience that may have been bad for them and so what happens is, while the kids are really bright and very capable, their behavior is causing have to be able to participate in the academic offerings. As that occurs, gaps occur and they start to fall behind.

Bradway: If the goal is to strive for inclusion back into the official system what the mechanisms to do that? They’ve just grown enough sustainable tools to be able to manage what they need to do to learn so that they can return to public system? It sounds like there’s probably far more support than what they would find in a public school system, How does that part of your program, how does that progress track to get to the point where they can return?

Dr. Joseph Dupelle: The LEA, Local Education Agency is part of each of those team meetings and we develop the IEPs and in those IEPs we talk about what are some of the strategies that are successful for the job and if we can get a child to feel comfortable with themselves to take pride in what they’re doing, and they’re making good choices they’re better able to make that next step. So when the District’s involved with us we can say, “This is what works for us. Do you have a capacity to do this and if you do we’re happy to transition?” Sometimes the districts come in and just observe the child in our program and see what we’re doing say, “Yeah, we can do that. I think we can pull that off for a child’s success.” Sometimes we have to go into the district and look at the programs in existence and say, “If this child is going to go in there, these kind of things might be necessary. “ We don’t have all the answers, clearly, but we’re always looking to find the answer for a child / school to give them that opportunity to be successful. Many my kids have not been successful at all and so when they come to us and they start being successful, we start seeing a whole different kid because all of a sudden they don’t look different from the other kids in the classroom, they’re not always having to leave the room for whatever reason, or in the principal’s office all time. We also go above and beyond. We don’t generally suspend kids at all because we can educate a kid that we sent home. It’s important for us, and the parents really appreciate the fact that we’re going to hang in there and do the best we can. There comes times when there are certain behaviors you cannot tolerate but 95%-99% of the time we can work around that. We can tolerate maybe the inappropriate language because we’re small enough to do it. A public school can’t always tolerate that if they’re in classrooms of 20 or 25 kids, it just doesn’t work. There’s just too much negative attention.

Diane Dillon: I look forward to bringing the focus on self-awareness and self-management so helping to teach kids how to self-regulate and to pay more attention to their own feelings and what they can do when they’re not feeling comfortable because kids do well when they can. Also working with families in terms of what changes might better support the child back at home so that there’s some more learning and reinforcement across settings.

Public Question: Where does the money come from?

Dr. Joseph Dupelle: Students are referred by the local education agencies and so it comes from public school funds. We work for the public schools, they’re the ones that pay to let that child be there.

Kate Burdsall: We have a unique opportunity to be able to work with this team right now as they’re planning what the school is going to be all about and we know what our needs are. Looking at kids that we have out of district, we can look at kids that we have in district. We may be able to bring back kids out of district and bring them to this and then eventually get them back to us. We may have students that we’re struggling to educate right now and it might make sense to have a bridge with them to do this. There’s going to be a huge family component to this as well, that’s going to be something I think very beneficial to us. In addition, we talked about professional development activities that they are known for with their staff that could be things that we also access. I think, for our student body, there’s a lot of possibilities and I think our families locally and keep it in place within the community, there are a lot of opportunities for that.  I think for our staff and our professionals working on the ground in our schools, there’s gonna be some collaboration development there. I think there’s a lot of opportunities.

Dr. Joseph Dupelle: The timeframe on this is hopefully to have students in by July 1. There is a process to follow with the Department of Education and there are a lot of rules and regulations. The first step for us is to get a letter of approval and then need to have three superintendents that would say they would consider sending students to us. Then statements of assurance typed up and we all have to sign Aliza, myself, the board of directors saying we’re going to follow all these policies.

Fields: Kate, what financial impact would this have on our district/budget?

Burdsall: It would be a positive impact. We could bring back students who are attending residential schools or we got kids who are attending schools outside of the district. The tuition paid out likely will be less, as well as the transportation cost would be less. We’ve canvassed from the Ct border to the Vt. border to see the need for this type of school. The need clearly exists.

Bannon: We need a motion to approve the children’s study home curriculum as a private school that serves Massachusetts students with disabilities at public expense and this is this program general law chapter 76 subsection 1. So Moved: J. St. Peter   Seconded: C. Shelton      Approved: Unanimously

Dillon: We can cancel the meeting for next week since we now have a quorum with Andy Potter in attendance.

Berkshire County Head Start Muddy Brook Expansion Proposal:

Executive Director, Stacy Parsons:

Berkshire County head start is that we are county-wide.  We currently operate 18 classrooms on seven different sites, Muddy Brook being one of them.  Our focus is all-around building school readiness so we serve children that are 2.9 to kindergarten. We have comprehensive services that is part of our model; pediatricians, dentists, nutritionist, social workers, transportation services, mental health coordinator, WIC referrals. Looking to offer an additional full-day Head Start/Daycare at MBE which would need an additional classroom and service 20 additional kids, on top of the 20 half-day we serve right now.

St Peter: Is the majority of the kids served is for our MBE families?

Stacy: Yes, and a few from S. Berkshire, but we have a limit of 45 minutes max on the bus.

Dillon: School readiness, so we’re setting them up for success and that’s less of a heavy lift that our K, 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade teachers have to do so it’s a nice partnership.

Bannon: We need a motion to approve the Head Start program, So Moved: W. Fields Seconded: A. Potter      Approved: Unanimously

Finance Committee-

Bannon: We’re going to skip the Finance Committee protocol until another meeting, When Rich Dohoney can be here.

Bannon: We have the Shaker Mountain special school union agreement review and hopefully a vote tonight.

District Consolidation & Sharing Sub-Committee-

Dillon: The tentative agreement that our subcommittee on shared services (Rich Bradway, Rich Dohoney, Steve Bannon) and Shaker Mountain subcommittee and shared services (representatives from each of the three towns plus their interim superintendent Bill Cameron) worked on. Lots of highly legal language, but couple of highlights: 1) we’re proposing shared superintendency and shared services with Shaker Mountain for a term of two years. In the discussions, was decided that two years made more sense than one year as investment in building relationships come the time to decide if we wanted to “share” for another year so proposed two years. 2) Compensation: Shaker Mountain Union will pay Berkshire Hills $60,000 in 1st year and $61,800 in 2nd year (based on a 3% increase in 2nd yr.), paid quarterly. 3) Extraordinary Travel (item #7):  travel within Berkshire County is part of the job, but trips to Boston or Malden on behalf of the Shaker Mountain Union (SMU) is considered extraordinary travel and will be covered by SMU. 4) Management (item #5) will meet regularly as a shared services group  to  do “check-in” AND existing superintendent’s evaluation and advisory subcommittee, that has four BHRSD members will be complemented by three additional members; one each from Richmond, Hancock and New Ashford, will be invited to join Superintendent’s Evaluation & Advisory Subcommittee. In lieu of 3 separate evaluations (1 for our district and 1 for each of their two schools), it’ll be one evaluation in aggregate; saving a lot of time. Rest mostly legalese; if we want out, we can get out. If they want out, they can get out. If superintendent not keeping up deal, that also grounds for them to get out of it, but don’t anticipate that happening.

 

Bannon: Rich Dohoney wanted to have expressed that he fully endorses this as an exciting proposal. I think this is a very exciting proposal for BHRSD.

 

Fields: Is Berkshire Hills saving money doing this? (was asked and said I’d ask at meeting) Are we going to save money in the long in this. We’re not going to save money in the short term but is this starting to look have a budgetary impact? The handwriting is on the wall for shared services. There is a perception out there that shared services and possible consolidation is going to save money.

Bannon: It may save money it’s not a panacea (def: a solution or remedy for all difficulties) that people wanted. We are getting $60k in the first year from Shaker Mountain; we are not spending $60k for Peter to do this. There will be some reduce costs but one of the misconceptions that many have is that this will result in lots of extra money for the District. There is real cost savings but the broader impact is improved services and hopefully we can slow down rising costs.

 

Motion to approve the Shared Services Agreement: A. Potter     Seconded: R. Bradway

Approved: Unanimously

Dillon: In the coming weeks, they have to approve it in each of their three towns, the union will need to approve. Committee will be notified when that happens.

 

Dillon There was a Great Barrington select board meeting last night and date set for a special meeting to appropriate the funds that 2 of the 3 towns voted in favor of to approve the school budget.

On June 13, 2016 at 6pm be meeting at the high school where the Great Barrington voters will be asked to appropriate the funds that were already approved by our budget because our regional agreement says if two of the three tens approve the budget, then we have an approved budget. The Great Barrington voters will approve it, if they don’t, there’s a whole lot complicated things that have to happen.

A.Potter: Details?

Dillon: Great Barrington is obligated to appropriate the funds. If Great Barrington chooses to not appropriate the funds then the district can do what anybody who’s entitled to funds does, presumably, and sue the town to meet its obligation. Expectation is that the funds will be appropriated at that meeting. The money that the town is already allocated for its own operating budget is dedicated to that so it doesn’t mean that if the town doesn’t meet its obligation that all other activities in the town would cease; layoffs, other programs, etc…. That is NOT TRUE.

Bannon: If, for some reason, at the June 13th town meeting, the town doesn’t appropriate, they’re going to would have to have another town meeting. The district is not obligated to change the budget because it passed in two of three towns.

 

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 Regional Agreement Amendment Sub Committee Update:-  

P. Dillon: As requested by the group in the meeting before, we brought in an outside consultant, Mark Abrahams, who’s a CPA, knows/does a lot in finance in Massachusetts and helped work on the foundation formula, twice. He talked RAAC about the budget, did an overview, there was some discussion. Tone of that meeting was better than the tone at the other meetings we’ve had. Meetings got a little heated and off track but seems we’re back on track. The committee asked us to gather some additional information to bring it back to the next meeting. Will continue to look at a range of models at the next meeting and start to figure which models /parts of models we might we might agree on. Mark hired to come to next meeting as consultant. I’ve also reached out to three national experts on school budgeting to see if they have any other ideas we’ve not yet considere

A. Potter: Also, a lot of this is politics, so have we invited Smitty Pignatelli.

S.Bannon: Yes I did. I sent him the dates for our next three meetings. Next meeting is June 21, 2016 @ 6pm

W. Fields: “I’m one of the Chairman and I guess this is for people who are watching on television, because I think there’s a misperception hear what the RAAC is. We all agree that public education is an investment in which the three towns all agree on, that this is something that we all value and that has been missed and I think in this public discourse that has unfortunately been out there in the last few weeks, especially due to the discussion of the town budget on Great Barrington’s town meeting floor. Our mission is to be recommending to the school committee – that should be cleared up. We do not have taxing authority, we do not have any vast power – we are recommending body to the school committee. So far, we’ve dealt a lot with cleaning up language of a document that was initiated in 1967 and was recently amended in 1991. As one person said, the elephant in the room is the finances, we all know that. There are two current proposals on the table, they have not been taken off the table: one is the uniform tax rate and the other is to do nothing. So it is the hope of this chairman and of the people I think who are on it from the other towns, that we will find something in the middle of those two. There are several proposals on the table that haven’t been offered yet as motions, but there have been LOTS of discussion on other ideas. People should also know that the district was two and a half years in the making and we’ve now gotten people say, “why are we making more progress? We have to schedule more meetings!”  This is a great committee. As one person said, some of the best minds of all three towns around are on this committee, the School Committee did a great job picking people.  I learned today that the district was actually formed by two committees; one first agreed to form a 9-12, that was the first group.  Then a year later came along with k-8. It was a two-step process to formulate this district, it wasn’t all done at once. People should understand this is a process that we’re going through, it’s not something that’s going to be done within 3, 4, 5 minutes; that’s important to understand, I believe that the public should be aware that there are things going on that are very positive so do not just listen and read what you may think and you hear about because that’s really not the case.”

R. Bradway: “I do want to just throw an objection to that. There is there’s one particular individual on that committee who has decided to band his proposals about in the court of public opinion, sometimes in advance of actually discussing this with his counterparts on that committee, which prevents them the opportunity to actually negotiate or discuss that. So he’s throwing it out there so that all of his proposals are colored in a particular way that makes it very difficult for the rest of the community to actually negotiate. In my opinion, if he continues to do that, he’s going to poison the well for everybody else. I don’t know what you do because he’s completely within his legal rights to do that, but at the same time it’s not going to afford any progress. I would say is that if he wants to see cooperation, he needs to start to work harder at cooperating and begin working with his counterparts on that committee.”

W. Fields: I agree with everything you’ve said.

S. Bannon: When MARS consultant was here and did a presentation on this, he said the average for a community takes about a year to do their work, no one should have the expectation that in three months this is going to get done. We it’s we figured about a year.

S. Bannon: going table the football league discussion till F. Clark can be here.

 

 Building and Grounds Sub Committee-

R. Bradway: Put on agenda for upcoming school committee to discuss philosophically what we want to do with respect to the high school and facilities-related issues that are immediate vs long term and understand what we need to do in order for us to maintain the facilities that we have now until something happens, if/when. Buildings and Grounds can talk till blue in the face but if we keep coming back and we hear, “No, we’re not going to do that.” then I want to see that the whole committee makes that decision.

Dillon: Does Buildings and Grounds have a memo or frame for looking at things or talking points in addition to the capital plan that you want the community to react to?

Bradway: We have a five year plan that we want to go back and look and review. What we’re particularly concerned with is that we prioritized it on what we felt were immediate needs and this meeting needs meaning- like so immediate that if we don’t do something we may not have a school and those things didn’t get addressed and we really feel that those things need to be talked about and because they do encompass a fairly large significance in the operations the high school, it does impact what do we want to with respect to a future project. Do we just do something to patch it and keep it going or do we actually look at it and try to address it, fix it, and possibly do it so that whatever we do could be transferred to the next project.

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S. Bannon: Seeing no public comment, call motion to adjourn.

            So move: A. Potter   Seconded: R. Bradway      Approved: Unanimously

The next meeting is scheduled for June 2, 2016 – 7:00 p.m.

  Regular Meeting – Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School –Library

 

Public Session Adjourned at 8:28pm     Submitted by:    Rebecca Burcher, Recorder

 

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Rebecca Burcher, Recorder

 

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School Committee Secretary