ConVal held its first public forum Thursday night, allowing community members to have a dialogue with the School Board members and school administrators in a way that was previously unavailable during School Board meetings.
Alan Edelkind, the School Board representative from Dublin, opened the meeting by discussing the community’s desire for a public forum and what motivated the Board to meet that demand.
“Why do we want a community forum?” Edelkind asked. “The answer is two words: dialogue, and transparency.”
Edelkind said that the ConVal community had a lot to discuss.
“Folks are passionate, they are intense, they are strongly focused in their thoughts and opinions,” he said. “And they should be. The decisions we make impact the most important aspects of their lives: their home, their pocketbooks, and most importantly, their children.”
Despite this passion, Edelkind called for civility and polite discussion.
The forum’s original agenda got disrupted slightly by lengthy question-and-answer sessions surrounding the first two presentation topics, which were on COVID-19 policies and the budget, and the informal nature of the forum allowed School Board Chair and forum moderator Tim Theberge to shuffle the evening’s discussion topics as desired by attendees.
Theberge presented on COVID-19 policies along with Kiera Christian, the Bennington School Board representative. They recapped the Board’s position on the district’s reopening framework, as well as their many previous discussions about mitigation strategies, and the potential for vaccination to significantly ease these strategies.
Jim Fredrickson, Sharon’s School Board representative, presented on the district budget, giving the audience a broad overview of the process and how the School Board and administration work together to create a budget.
Community members were able to ask clarifying questions of the Board on these topics and have conversations surrounding issues such as the health data on which the district bases its current decision matrix, how remote learning impacts the budget, when parents should keep their kids at home.
The discussion ranged along further topics after Theberge, on request from the audience, elected to skip over the final presentation from school administrators on learning recovery and curriculum changes and go straight to open discussion. Audience members were able to ask about the upkeep of the district’s athletic fields and the broader future of the district.
Many of the attending community members thanked the Board and the administration for setting up the forum.
“It can be really frustrating to not have dialogue with you guys,” said Erin Nolan of Peterborough. “So I think this is really great.”
Julia Beam of Hancock also thanked the Board for the forum. “I think it’s great, I think it’s really important for everybody to stay in communication and discuss issues,” she said.
“We really do hope this is the start of a quarterly series of forums where the public gets to interact with us in a little bit more informal manner than is at the Board meeting, which I know can be frustrating to many people,” said Theberge. “We’ll do it again.”