Berkshire Hills schools to resume in-person learning berkshireeagle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from berkshireeagle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
STOCKBRIDGE â As budget season begins, the town plans to institute a âzero-basedâ formula for municipal spending.
That means starting from scratch instead of updating operating budget line items from the current year, Finance Committee Chairman Jay Bikofsky said during a meeting last week.
âEverything needs to be justified, as opposed to âlevel funding,â as done in the past,â he pointed out.
Town Administrator Michael Canales said that he has asked department heads to âfocus on reviewing what theyâre asking for, why theyâre asking for it, and how these numbers are calculated.â The practice has been to either ask for the same amount as the previous year, or a cost-of-living salary increase.
Teachers unions and some lawmakers have pushed Massachusetts to scrap a standardized testing requirement in a pandemic-impacted school year, but the state and some advocacy groups still want public schools to administer tests this year.
Preparing for and administering the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, opponents fear, would take away learning time that is especially scarce due to the pandemic. Moreover, some question the ability of standardized testing to measure student performance, since test results are often shown to correlate strongly with race and family income, among other social factors.
MCAS supporters, however, claim the difficult year makes the test particularly important for measuring whether students have fallen behind. Information gathered from testing, they say, would help parents see how their children are doing and allow the state to identify where additional resources might be needed.
LEE â A post-holiday spike in COVID-19 cases has prompted Lee Public Schools to send students home â temporarily â for remote learning.
And Berkshire Hills Regional School District students will remain in remote learning mode for at least another week.
Lee district officials made the decision to suspend the hybrid education model as of Monday, likely lasting until Jan. 26, according to Superintendent Michael Richard.
State health officials reported Lee has been in the âredâ the last two weeks, reporting a positivity rate of almost 10 percent as of Jan. 7. The red zone is the worst of the four-color levels for COVID 19 in Massachusetts.