The Mohawk Trail Regional School District Committee just voted at their May 13 meeting to defund our district, at Superintendent Sheryl Stanton and Assistant Superintendent William Lataille’s urging, by severely limiting the ability of students from other districts to choice-in to ours.

By doing this, Stanton and Lataille have engineered a crisis that will do three things:

• Our enrollment, which has been growing for the past five years, will immediately plummet—especially in Colrain, which stands to potentially lose 43 students.
• Along with that plummeting enrollment, we will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funding.
• Taken together, Stanton and Lataille’s plan will create a fiscal crisis forcing the district’s voters to close schools or see truly astronomical property tax increases. Stanton and Lataille will then be able to single the Colrain school out as under-enrolled and argue that closing it is the only path to sustainability. This is the ultimate point: to force school closures, by any means necessary, beginning with Colrain, which may close in as little as two years.

We can beat this, but we are going to need every one of you to help.

Please send this letter to our school committee members, Stanton, Lataille, our state elected representatives, and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education urging them to repeal their vote at their next School Committee meeting, on June 10. Then join us at that School Committee meeting, June 10th, 6PM, at the Mohawk high school.