This year, the Massachusetts School Building Authority approved a plan to replace the decrepit Greylock Elementary North Adams first submitted in 2019. In anticipation of the move, the city closed the facility earlier this year and redistributed its students to other schools as part of a larger grade system restructuring.
The total cost for the project?
$65.4 million.
“The school building committee went through an extensive process, and we did indeed look at renovating Brayton [School] or building new at Greylock [School], and it was determined that Greylock was the best investment we could make for our future educational system," Mayor Jennifer Macksey told WAMC. "So, the takeaway is, we have this opportunity for a $42 million grant from the Massachusetts School Building Association, and we're in line for a $3 million grant for with the Inflationary Recovery Act funding, and we have $45 million in play, and the taxpayers need to support a vote which is not a Proposition 2 ½ override.”
Proposition 2 ½ is a 1980 state law that limits how much revenue a municipality like North Adams can raise through its tax levy.
“It is called a debt exclusion vote to allow us to borrow $20 million exempt from Proposition 2½, which means that it is not a permanent rise to our tax levy, but just a temporary rise in our tax levy for the life of the loan, which would be estimated at 30 years," Macksey explained. "So, the takeaway is we need to invest in our future. We need to invest in the educational facilities to make sure that our students are getting the best education that they need, and that we aren't moving kids around because we have a leaky roof or no heat in the building, et cetera.”
Macksey says the move is also an economic development tool, creating jobs for local contractors and making the community more attractive to businesses and families.
As is the case in the often-choppy political waters of North Adams, there is a vocal opposition movement.
Joseph Smith is the chair of Save Brayton North Adams, a reference to the group’s desire for the city to improve the existing Brayton School building instead of building the new Greylock school.
He says the city has better, less costly options than the one it’s pushing to voters.
“The main profile that we fit is along the lines of an aging population that's not just shrinking, but aging," Smith told WAMC. "And we have a 15% poverty rate in our city. We have a lot of elderly on fixed incomes, and as one might imagine, any city that has a 15% poverty rate also has plenty of people who are just above the poverty rate. And we also have a community where the household income, the median household income, is less than $50,000, so we have people in our community who are choosing between, with the rising prices of groceries and stuff like that, choosing between what they eat and whether they take medication.”
Smith says the MSBA’s accelerated repair program is a more economic route for North Adams to pursue.
He’s also accused the city of misrepresenting data to voters, saying it’s relying on dated numbers that obfuscate the projected degree of North Adams’ future enrollment drop.
“The other main concern that we have is that we've come to find that the latest enrollment projection numbers were not actually shared with the public and were withheld, which is a you know, transparency issue," Smith said. "And the newer projections were worse than the older ones, and they were also more in line with an independent study that the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission had done which showed a more disturbing decline, and it seems to have been willful that they withheld that.”
Smith points to an August public meeting where North Adams Public Schools Superintendent Barbara Malkas said the city only has projection for the school through 2030 and presented a 2021 draft of MSBA data on the subject. While a 2021 report on Greylock projected an enrollment of 625 through 2030, a more recent 2023 report pegs the number at 535 through 2033.
The North Adams Public Schools mentions both reports on its webpage dedicated to the Greylock School project, and bolster both projections with “91 ‘seats outside of the project school’ from PreK programs.”
In an interview with the Berkshire Eagle published October 5th, Malkas claimed the city used the 2021 numbers in the presentation instead of the updated 2023 numbers from the MSBA because there were “no visual aids in the more recent report.”
WAMC reviewed the January 2023 MSBA enrollment projections for North Adams and found that the document was almost entirely comprised of visual aids, including flow charts, graphs, and other resources.
In a statement to WAMC, Malkas denied any wrongdoing on the part of the city, writing:
“We re-entered eligibility to establish the Prek-2 grade configuration and the MSBA did an updated projected enrollment to ascertain the enrollment of a prek-2 school. The letter for this projected enrollment is also on our website. Using either projected enrollment, the number of students in grades K-6 with added enrollment for PreK exceeds the capacity of our existing schools as identified in the NESDEC report from 2017. This is also indicated in the letter from the MSBA dated 2/8/23.”
Macksey maintains that North Adams has remained transparent through the process and that voters need to center the needs of city youth in their decision.
“At the end of the day, Josh, we still can't fit all of our kids in one building," said the mayor. "We still need two schools. So, whether we're talking about 90 kids or we're talking about 190 kids, which that isn't the sway, but we still can't fit everyone with the educational plan that the MSBA makes us have for square footage. Nobody is doing the cat and mouse game. All we want as an administration is for the public to make an educated vote.”
Smith and other opponents of the plan say North Adams has more pressing concerns than building a new school, especially in the wake of last year’s devastating flooding from heavy rains that dealt a multi-million dollar blow to the city’s infrastructure.
“My concern, and the concern of a lot of people, is that if you have to do a Prop 2 ½ exclusion, it's going to mean that you even have less money for other things, like hiring new teachers, making sure those water lines, which are decrepit across the city, terribly old, that those other things will be harder to muster the funds to address them,” he told WAMC.
For its part, the MSBA has declared the situation a local concern and directed all questions about the subject to Malkas and the North Adams Public Schools.
Polls are open at St. Elizabeth's Parish Center from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
