The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
Update on Regionalization Efforts
| To: | Members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education |
| From: | Mitchell D. Chester, Ed.D., Commissioner |
| Date: | April 16, 2010 |
Over the last few years, we have been helping districts to identify and study potential regionalization opportunities. The first fruit of these efforts came just last month, when I had the pleasure of approving the regional agreement for the new Ayer-Shirley Regional School District, the first new regional district to be established in nine years.
Because this month's Board meeting is being held at the Nashoba Valley Regional Vocational-Technical School District, I thought this would be an appropriate time to update the members of the Board on these efforts. I have asked Associate Commissioner Jeff Wulfson to make a brief presentation at the meeting. He will be joined by Christine Lynch from our Center for School Finance, Planning, Research, and Evaluation, and Steve Hemman, former superintendent at Narragansett Regional School District and currently the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS).
As background for this discussion, I am enclosing a copy of a research brief on regionalization that the Department issued last fall. It is a good synopsis of the potential for regionalization and the obstacles that need to be overcome to make it happen. Two other recent Department reports on regionalization are available on our website at http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/regional/. The first is a summary of the various regional planning studies that the Department has helped fund in the past few years. The second is a study of central office capacity in regional districts, produced in partnership with MARS.
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