Mount Greylock District Addressing Shortfall in State Report
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School District is working to address a deficiency identified in the commonwealth's recent Special Education and Civil Rights Monitoring Report.
The three-school district last spring went through a periodic review by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that focused on standards ranging from "licensure and professional development" to "parent/student/community engagement" to "equal access."
The district was found to have implemented "universal standards" in 27 of the 29 criteria covered in the review.
One criterion where the Lanesborough-Williamstown district fell short was addressed relatively easily with a single change to the district's Bullying Prevention and Intervention Plan.
The other concern raised in the DESE report will take more work, administrators recently told the School Committee.
Under the heading "Curriculum Review," the state auditors found that the district, "does not consistently ensure that individual teachers in the district review all educational materials for simplistic and demeaning generalizations, lacking intellectual merit, on the basis of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation and that appropriate activities, discussions, and/or supplementary materials are used to provide balance and context for any such stereotypes depicted in such materials."
Districts are rated for each criterion on a four-grade scale: implemented, implemented with comment, partially implemented and not implemented. Mount Greylock was rated "partially implemented" for Curriculum Review.
"The federal mandate is that we have a process for individual teachers to go through," interim Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the committee during its monthly meeting. "It isn't enough to go through the process at a district level or a school level. This is about a process and training for individual teachers."
Director of Curriculum and Instruction Joelle Brookner told the committee that the administration has developed a worksheet for teachers to use to evaluate classroom materials for concerns like bias or underrepresentation of certain groups.
"This work is really at the heart of everything we do," Brookner told the committee. "It's at the heart of our [diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging] work. We expect that we will sometimes find ourselves faced with curricular materials that are outdated and contain biases that we need to erase from the curriculum. But we're also expecting that this process of review will even, more importantly, help us discover places where representation is missing.
"I was in one of the elementary schools, and someone said, 'We're not going to buy things and hang up posters that are terrible.' And, I said, no, this is not questioning people's intentions. But it's a perfect opportunity to say, 'Are we representing our students? Do they see themselves in the curriculum and in all of our spaces?' We are really not interested in compliance for compliance's sake. We're interested in what is the absolute best for all of our students."
A plan was implemented this fall to start training teachers for the kind of curricular review required by federal mandate, Brookner said. And, going forward, that kind of training will be worked into the district's professional development plan for faculty.
School Committee member Jose Constantine asked whether the long-discussed and currently unfunded district-level DEIB director position could help manage that work.
"I'm not sure I can answer that exactly," Brookner said. "But I am looking forward to the work of the DEIB Committee that Joe [Bergeron] is convening that will look at our practices and our policies. There are many themes that are intersecting, and I foresee we may be able to answer your question better in a couple of months.
"We need individual teachers to be the ones doing that work. So we're trying to organize time and give them time. … We're trying to show with our resources that this is really important."
Bergeron agreed that the curriculum review isn't something the district can assign to any one individual.
"However, I think something that we do hope to see is, as these worksheets are being filled out, as the teachers are spending their time on the work, questions will come up," Bergeron said. "And how we best answer those questions … it's possible one person could end up being the director of traffic for that. But that is all to be determined. That's why seeing how this [curriculum review] process works as we ramp it up is important."
As for the one criterion out of 29 where the district was graded "implemented with comment," that referred to its Bullying Intervention and Prevention Plan – specifically one sentence in a policy that read, "The principal or designee, upon receipt of a viable report, shall promptly contact the parents or guardians of a student who has been the alleged target or alleged aggressor of bullying."
After the policy was flagged by the DESE auditors, the district took corrective action by removing the word "viable" from that sentence.
In other business on Thursday, the School Committee:
• unanimously passed five district policies related to the use of technology and social media;
• received a review of the district's summer programs from Noelle Sullivan, the interim director of special education at Williamstown Elementary School;
• learned from Bergeron that the district has not yet seen any unforeseen expenses impacting the fiscal year 2025 budget;
• heard that Bergeron has held individual conversations with members of the advisory group he assembled to help the district find a DEI consultant;
• and was told that the middle/high school has begun a process to review its program of studies.
"This is all best practices at work, but what triggered it was the need to make a budget decision [in June] in an environment that felt like it was happening too quickly, without a lot of process around it," Bergeron told the committee.
Mount Greylock has begun to hold meetings to talk about the type of data that needs to be collected, the ways the school wants to measure success and how to make sure all voices are heard in the review process.
"In order to have the strongest school possible, we're going to be looking at all of the things we need to do, the things we have traditionally done that we don't want to lose, the things we want to do – how all of that fits within the context of metrics that we view as important, whether those are MCAS scores, AP test scores, college entrance, life success," Bergeron said.
"The reason it's especially important for this governing body to be thoroughly involved there is it has fairly serious budgetary implications. As we talked about this spring, our school district is spending significantly less per pupil than most or all of our peers. That is a point where we need to take a step back and say, one, how can we manage within that, but, two, how can we advocate, whether it's at the local level or the state level or the federal level for the additional funding we need to see the growth of student success that we want to."•
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