The North Adams school committee says the consolidation will close Greylock Elementary and redistribute its students to Brayton Elementary and Colegrove Park Elementary while simultaneously rejiggering the district’s grade structure.
Mayor Jennifer Macksey frames the move as an economic necessity for the city, citing budget gaps spurred by the end of federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program established during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With that, we look at the budget, and we certainly look at all the positions we have, and we mirror that against the enrollment," explained Macksey. "As we've discussed at school committee several times, we do have a declining enrollment for our school system. So, with that, it is how do we close the gap? And coupled by that is the facility issues that we have at Greylock School. As everyone knows, the building is in disrepair, and we are in line to do an MSBA project but we're not quite there yet, and to be fiscally sound and to be fiscally prudent and in responsible, we looked at, what does it mean if we were to close Greylock? And with that we were able to close most of the gap.”
A plan to build a new school on the site of Greylock Elementary was submitted to the Massachusetts School Building Authority by North Adams in 2019, and the city says the project remains in the design phase.
“The data tells us that we can adequately fit merging Greylock and Brayton together through grade span configuration, and with that keeps us in an average class size, I would say, probably 20 to 24, 24 being the highest, by merging Greylock or moving Greylock to Brayton, and making that a pre-K to 2 school, and then Colgrove for a 3 to 6, and then the high school would remain 7 to 12,” said Macksey.
With Greylock set to go offline by the end of the summer, the students will move to their newly assigned schools in September to start the new year.
“We're very sensitive to preserving the educational goals that we have for our school department and the experience that our students have, but we also need to be accountable to the taxpayers, and we can't put that burden, a $2 million gap, on the taxpayers,” the mayor told WAMC.
The closure and consolidation will mean job cuts in the North Adams school department.
“We will see increases in class size, but not exceeding the evidence-based, research-based approach to average class size, and then ensuring that we maintain access to an exploratory art program, exploratory music program, or instrumental music program for grades 3 through 6, access to library resources," said Superintendent Barbara Malkas. "So, we've really ensured that the student experience will not be impacted by the cuts in terms of teaching positions. And then of course, when you're closing a school, you have to look at some of the other support positions as well, which would include custodial services, maintenance, school nurse, behavior technician, some of the other positions. So, in total, we're looking at a cut of 29 FTE or full-time equivalents.”
Malkas says consolidation has potential benefits for students.
“With our sixth-grade classrooms, where we were seeing pretty small class sizes – you know, 10 students – now being in a classroom where there's 22 students, 23 students, gives them a greater opportunity to kind of socialize, develop those social skills with their peers that they may or may not know from other parts of the city," she told WAMC. "But also, it gives them an opportunity to get to know each other now, before they're going to high school, where we always had to think about, how do we integrate all of these different students.”
The superintendent says that if the new Greylock building plan is approved, North Adams will once again have an opportunity to reconsider the use of its school facilities.
