District/School Administration Administration
The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education

Update on the Department's Regional Collaboration Efforts

The proposed amendments to the regional school district regulations on the agenda for our May 19 meeting give me an opportunity to update you on the Department's efforts to foster more regional collaboration among the Commonwealth's 330 operating school districts. Half of our school districts have fewer than 2000 students, making it difficult for many of them to provide a full range of educational and support services at a reasonable cost. Given our limited fiscal resources, seeking out new opportunities for regional collaboration in K12 education is a major priority for the Governor, the Secretary, and me.

Our efforts in this area fall under two general headings - providing a regional system of support to existing districts, and encouraging our smallest districts to consolidate into larger units.

Regional system of support

The Department's Center for Targeted Assistance is working to provide a statewide regional system of support through a two-tiered strategy. The ten largest, highest poverty districts in the Commonwealth are known as the Commissioner's Districts and are given first priority for State oversight and support (Tier 1). For each of these districts we are providing the following targeted assistance: guidance, training and specific data collection tools that serve instructional leadership, classroom practice, and teacher collaboration; conducting and modeling structured school site visits; and conducting data-driven problem solving sessions with district leaders. To improve student performance in the remaining districts (Tier 2), we are seeking to provide this same range of support through two regional approaches. First, in an effort to leverage resources and maximize the impact of federal funds, we directed a percentage of the FY 08 and FY 09 Title I School Improvement Grant (SIG) regionally to Title I schools. This regional distribution of funding enabled us to pilot a more collaborative approach to supporting small- and medium-sized districts in need of intervention that alone lack the infrastructure and capacity to address causes of low performance. The regional approach to this grant program, now in its second year, has initiated and promoted cross-district collaboration and cooperation by concentrating and pooling resources to realize better economies of scale and benefit from collaboration that transcends district boundaries.

The second Tier 2 regional effort began in November 2008 when the Department launched a pilot "regional school improvement assistance center" to enhance the capacity of district personnel to identify and respond to the assistance needs of low performing schools in the Greater Boston metropolitan area. Serving the districts of Revere, Somerville, Everett, Saugus, Malden, Medford, Winthrop, Cambridge and Chelsea, the School Improvement Assistance Center (SIAC) is currently engaged in facilitating a range of multi-district program initiatives identified by the participating district leaders. The Center for Targeted Assistance plans to launch three additional "regional school improvement assistance centers" by fall 2009 that would serve districts in the southeastern, western and central parts of the state. The Department is currently engaged in discussions with the Executive Office of Education to integrate the activities of these three regional centers with the Governor's proposed Commonwealth Readiness Centers.

Regionalization and district consolidation

The Department's Center for School Finance, Planning, Research, and Evaluation coordinates our work in encouraging smaller districts to consolidate into more efficiently-sized entities. Earlier this year we issued planning grants to a dozen groups of communities around the state, ranging from the outer Cape to the Berkshires, giving them the opportunity to begin studying the advantages and disadvantages of various configurations and organizational options. We are also working with the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS) on a study of central office staffing patterns that we hope will provide useful information to local officials.

Among the proposals currently under consideration:

• The towns of Ayer, Lunenburg, and Shirley have completed an extensive study resulting in a recommendation to create a new, three-town regional district. This proposal is expected to be presented to their respective town meetings this fall.
• The towns of Berkley and Somerset have begun intensive discussions on creating a new regional high school, with encouragement and support from the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
• Just this past week, a proposal to consolidate the small, K-6 Hawlemont district into the Mohawk Trail district was defeated at one town meeting by only four votes. Although disappointing, the narrow margin of defeat gives us hope that the proposal might be favorably reconsidered in the future.
• The Franklin County School Project, under the auspices of Greenfield Community College and with financial support from the Department and other organizations, has produced an excellent series of reports outlining the challenges and opportunities of regional collaboration and consolidation in one of the state's most rural areas. We have put their most recent report, written by the New England School Development Council (NESDEC), on our Department website (http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/regional/FranklinCountyStudy.pdf ) as a resource for others around the state.

Regionalization is a difficult political process, in part due to the long history of independent towns dating back to Colonial times, and it can take years of study for a proposal to reach the point of public acceptance. Some states have tried to mandate district consolidation, with varying degrees of success. Right now our approach in Massachusetts is to encourage and assist local officials and citizens in studying options and identifying solutions that make sense for their communities.