Saturday October 20, 2012

WILLIAMSTOWN -- The Mount Greylock Regional School District's annual budget is on par with the spending of regional school districts of similar size and demographic.

School Committee member Heather Williams presented an analysis comparing Mount Greylock's finances to nine other regional school districts in Massachusetts on Tuesday night.

"The idea behind this analysis is that we should compare apples to apples, and figure out whether or not Mount Greylock is spending more than schools like us given the number of students we have, or less," she said.

The analysis was started by Steve Sheppard, a member of the Long-Range Financial Planning Committee and an economics professor at Williams College, and the information Williams presented was to update the analysis done in 2007 and 2009.

For Mount Greylock and each of the other nine school districts, a dot is plotted on a graph where the number of in-district students on one axis lines up with the school's budget on the other axis, she said. Then once the information is plotted, a line is drawn that best fits the 10 points, Williams said.

"Most schools fall very close to the line," she said.

Looking at the past five years beginning with fiscal 2011, Mount Greylock's budget has been close to the line, but it was $1 to $2 million above the line five years ago, she said.

"Then with the adjustments after the crash, we have been sitting right on the line, so

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as a school, our budget is almost exactly what you'd predict for a school of our size and type," she said.

The findings made by the analysis are of concern since the school district should be above average with its finances as it is with its programming, she said.

"Sometimes people say Mount Greylock is such a rich school, and we're not. We're average in terms of our budget," she said.

Williams said she also updated the sections of the analysis that compare the cost per student spent by each regional school district in a specific area.

There were two areas where Mount Greylock fell outside the group, which were spending on professional development and spending on insurance and retirement, she said.

The amount per student spent on professional development was below what was spent by the other nine school districts, while the amount spent on insurance and retirement at Mount Greylock had historically been high, she said.

To reach Meghan Foley, email
mfoley@thetranscript.com.