Bordering Towns May Create First Interstate School District In Massachusetts

Voters in a Berkshire County town have signed off on exploring a schools merger with a community right across the border in Vermont.

Under the plan, Clarksburg, Massachusetts, would educate its grade three through eight students and those from Stamford, Vermont.

Stamford would take care of all pre-K through grade two students.

John Franzoni is the superintendent of the North Berkshire School Union, and oversees Clarksburg.

"Clarksburg has no pre-kindergarten program due to space issues in the building," he said. "We also don't have some social/emotional special education type programs that would be beneficial to keep all of our students in-district."

Cynthia Lamore, head of the Stamford school board, said the town first considered joining with other Vermont communities.

"Our town voted down merging with Reedsboro and Halifax, finding it was geographically too hard," she said.

She said the Massachusetts school is only about four miles away.

Already, the Vermont town's high school students choose to go to school in North Adams.

Lamore said the merger would help those students by introducing them to Massachusetts tests earlier.

"They're ecountering the MCAS testing for the first time — which is a state required test for graduation — in their sophomore year," she said.

But there are many hurdles that would have to be cleared before a merger could proceed. 

Jeff Wulfson, deputy commissioner at the Massachssetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said among them is that new state legislation would be required.

"There's a lot of issues that would need to be addressed, whether it be teacher licensing or curriculum standards," he said, "or how the funding works, how the school committtee is constituted. We don't have anything currently on our law books that address any of those questions." 

Wulfson said if the merger happens, it would create the first interstate school district in Massachusetts.

Vermont already has a cross-border school district. Its Norwich students go to school with students from Hanover, New Hampshire.

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