Local Education Can Be Economic Driver, Not Financial Drain

Daegan Miller

It is no secret that our local public schools—like public schools everywhere outside of the wealthiest zip codes—are in trouble: decades of bipartisan underfunding, a war on teachers and staff, increasing need for special services, the rising cost of building maintenance and staff healthcare coupled with the challenges unique to rural areas, like declining population and the wear and tear on busses…we all know the litany. The typical solution, offered by school boards and local politicians, even back in the late 1980s, when the rural town I grew up in started slashing its education budget, is austerity. Property taxes, we are told, are too high for the education that country kids deserve; it’s a bad financial proposition. And so we cut our losses.

This seems to be the situation that the Mohawk Trail and Hawlemont Districts are in. Berk12, an educational consulting group, has been paid $283,000 to arrive at five possible solutions, two of which involve closing schools and, in the name of efficiency, throwing staff out of work (a third proposal, moving all 6th grade classes to Mohawk, also seems likely to involve cutting jobs). The Berk12 consultants have made no secret of that fact that they prefer the most drastic options: “While many [previous] studies have yielded some successes (depending on perspective),” they write in their November, 2024 update, “many have failed to realize full recommendations based on resistance from varied stakeholder groups (families, towns, school staff, school committees).” 

I want to propose another way of thinking about public education. In a region, like ours, without much in the way of a commercial or industrial base, what if the public school system isn’t a drain on our local economy, as the consultants at Berk12 are working hard to make us believe, but our local economic engine. Think of the traffic through our towns during morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up, the teachers and staff filling up their gas tanks and grabbing a snack at the local gas stations, the millions of dollars in staff and teacher salaries that wind up in the pockets of every small business owner in the region, and all the innumerable other ways that our schools bring us together for music, potlucks, plays, and sports.

No one would seriously consider shuttering the shops on Bridge Street in Shelburne Falls to save the taxpayers the expense of maintaining the road, bridge, sidewalks, sewer, water, electric, and other public infrastructure, so I can’t see it as anything other than tragically shortsighted to shut our schools. 

Of course, simply shifting our perspective isn’t going to solve the problems we face—but it might reveal that the solutions Berk12 proposes are nothing of the sort. There’s nothing efficient about cutting jobs. It’s too late, I know, to urge the consultants to spend their quarter-million-dollar fee researching and advocating for options that might help us all thrive by working with the “stakeholder groups”—the parents, teachers, staff, unions, and state representatives—on bringing home some of the more than $3 billion that the Fair Share Amendment has so far generated for schools and roads, or on organizing and lobbying the state to fulfill its commitment to the rural schools in Western Mass. Berk12 isn’t going to do that—they’re here to cut us down, not help us up—but I can’t believe that a good, sustainable future for the Hilltowns involves throwing our neighbors out of work today and foreclosing on our kids’ futures.