New England Public Radio

Berkshire Schools Cope With Sagging Enrollment, Look To Adjust

The population of Berkshire County is dropping, and continues to drop. And this trend is taking school enrollment down with it. A recent study finds school funding and course offerings are declining in many schools around the Berkshires. Now a group of administrators, elected officials and community members are trying to come up with ways to change the education landscape in the Berkshires.

It’s 2 p.m. and students at Hoosac Valley Middle and High School in Cheshire, Massachusetts, eagerly headed for the exits. These hallways were far less crowded during a recent visit than just 15 years ago. Enrollment for the Adams Cheshire School District plummeted by more than 30 percent between the year 2000 and 2015. School districts largely receive annual funding based on how many students they have. So Interim School Superintendent Robert Putnam said that’s led to some tough choices.

“There are courses that we have to offer — academic courses — and, unfortunately. what goes first are the courses that are not absolutely essential for moving forward academically for college preparation and graduation from high school,” Putnam said.

Among the cuts: wood shop and an early childhood education program for high school students. Putnam said that despite significant cuts recently, the budget pressure remains.

“We have found just to maintain what we want to maintain requires that we spend an additional $300,000 to $600,000,” Putnam said. “That becomes incredibly difficult.”

The Berkshire Education Task Force is looking at ways schools can work together to improve public education in the county. To get started, the group commissioned a study by the Donahue Institute at UMass Amherst. It revealed that most Berkshire public schools are facing similar problems as Adams-Cheshire.

“The decline has been about 22 percent over the last 15 years,” said Eliot Levine, the report’s author. “That’s the equivalent of losing the same amount of students as the county’s largest district — Pittsfield.”

And that’s a staggering number when considering the enrollment statewide fell only 1.7 percent over the same time. And as for the future?

“It’s expected to continue, or projected to continue, with another 11 percent loss over the next ten years, and possibly continuing with additional loss beyond that,” Levine said.

The enrollment drop is not only a rural problem. The county’s largest school district, Pittsfield, has about 5,500 kids, 17 percent less than at the start of the century. Superintendent Jason McCandless said they are dealing with not only fewer school-aged children in Pittsfield, but some who leave the city for their education, taking critical funding with them.

“Two million dollars worth of Pittsfield students choose to go to school elsewhere via the school choice program,” McCandless said. “About another $2 million of Pittsfield students choose to go to the Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter School.”

To combat this, the Pittsfield schools have started a campaign — complete with billboards, advertisements and open houses — to try to keep students from leaving the school district, or attract kids from other towns. All this, of course, pits district against district, almost all of which are dealing with enrollment declines.

So how long can the current education model work in the Berkshires? John Hockridge chairs the county’s education task force.

“It’s not a long-term, 10-year or 15-year situation that we’re looking at,” Hockridge said. “We’re looking at in the next one to five years, many of our school districts will be reaching a point where they can’t continue to operate the way they are.”

Hockridge said the next phase of the group’s work includes developing various models with education consultants. One solution might include districts sharing services, such as special education like some northern Berkshire schools are exploring now, or multiple systems sharing one superintendent. School districts could also combine to make a larger regional system.

Whatever the solution, Hockridge said it might be a hard sell convincing communities to give up power they have now.

“It certainly will be a challenge, we know that,” Hockridge said. “Local control is very important to our municipalities and we want to develop models where the communities have a strong input…I think this is all bigger than all of us.”

It will be up to the towns and current school districts to decide what to do with the task force’s recommendations, which are due out this summer.

And this is a conversation going on across Western Massachusetts. A number of school leaders in Franklin County have banded together in an effort to tackle similar issues as their neighbors to the west.

Western Mass. School Superintendents Frustrated By State Findings On Suspensions

Massachusetts education officials say more than 30 schools and districts across the state suspend students more than they should. A publicly released list shows a number of those cited are in western Massachusetts. And some administrators from these communities say the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

A 2014 state law requires heightened reporting of suspensions by school districts. and it calls on regulators to identify, and assist those with high rates of suspensions, either across the board or of a particular demographic.

“This law and the department’s interest is in insuring that kids are in class, in school as much as possible so that they can learn and achieve,” says Cliff Chuang with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

In Westfield, the city’s high school was called-out by the state: A third of its Hispanic and Latino students faced some sort of discipline, and half of those received suspensions. Superintendent Suzanne Scallion says she’s troubled by the state’s decision to release the numbers. They’re from the 2014-15 school year, and she says the school and district have made strides since then.

“I don’t know the purpose of embarrassing districts or schools,” Scallion says. “I think the data should have been scrutinized much more deeply before this report went out.”

Scallion says Westfield has worked to identify and help at-risk students sooner, opened an alternative school and looked for ways to avoid using suspensions. She also says Westfield sees a high number of young people placed at group homes or as foster children in the city and those students often find themselves in trouble at school. Scallion says the schools are trying to work with child welfare officials to find out more about these new arrivals ahead of time, to help keep them out of the principal’s office.

“The more information that we can get up-front, the more successful that student is going to be because we can put in place services from the beginning, instead of going on a failure model, where that child is falling through the cracks,” Scallion says.

Another district facing challenges in this area: Pittsfield. The state says the Berkshire County district suspends African American male students on types of special education plans at a high rate. Superintendent Jason McCandless, who acknowledged the disparity to the school committee this month, says the district will continue to work on the problem.

“We have to look at ourselves first, look at our own practices and attitudes first,” McCandless says. “Then we really have to look at what could we be doing better in the schools to support students and how can we be more creative.”

But if schools fail to address disparities, fail to keep more kids in class, what “stick,” if you will, does the state hold? McCandless says it’s not clear to him the state can do anything but use public pressure.

“I don’t know that there’s really a penalty for this other than the state’s threat to make it public, ‘And you know we’re going to send out a press release,’ and that’s all well and good,” McCandless says.

For McCandless and other superintendents, there’s another source of frustration: What exactly counts as a suspension? State law says any time a student is removed from from regular classroom activities, but not from the school, that counts as an in-school suspension, even if they continue to receive direct instruction from a teacher. The state’s Cliff Chuang acknowledges the definitions still need work.

“We obviously have rules and specifications around what would qualify in our data handbooks,” Chuang says. “I think there’s a lot more nuance and context, and that’s part of what we want to learn.”

And learning, for regulators, districts and students, that’s what this is all about. Both superintendents, Scallion and McCandless, say they’d be happy to implement more programs and find other solutions, if the state would be willing to help fund them.