After nearly a year of research and interviews with members of the public and the school system, the Community Academic and Support Team, or CAST, has released a 158-page report with data and recommendations for the Mascenic School District – including recommendations about communication that the district has agreed to implement.

CAST is a community group, formed after last year’s school deliberative session, in which voters cut the budget by $1 million and several petition articles called for measures such as eliminating the superintendent position and installing a budget cap.

Started by resident Mitch Gluck, who said he was disturbed by what seemed to him a wide gulf between neighbors over school issues, the group was intentionally formed to include residents who had diverse views to dig into data and potential solutions for items raised at deliberative session. These issues included declining enrollment, class sizes, student-teacher ratios, early exit and dropout rates, student achievement, cost per pupil, turnover rates, taxes and the budget process.

Though Gluck said the group fluctuated over the course of the year, there were a core group of a little more than a dozen who remained constant and did the bulk of the work on the report: Jonathan Bouley, Rachel Anderson, Marlene Damery, Jessica Haavisto, Carolyn Cormier, Julie Lampinen, Jeff Muhonen, Emily Krook, Ed Rogers, Tim Somero, John Cocozella and Kristen Stauffeneker, along with Gluck, who served as a chair and facilitator.

Gluck, who was not on the board when the group started, is now serving as an interim member of the Mascenic School Board. He said the report has been presented to the School Board, which has responded to the recommendations. Those responses have been included into the report, which is now posted on the district's website and will be available in several other public locations.

The School Board has responded to the report, in many cases reporting that the recommendation was already part of an ongoing process. In some cases, the district found it would not be able to implement a recommendation due to either time and resource constraints or legal obligations.

Points the board agreed could either be implemented or improved included several points where better communication of issues was sought. For example, the report recommended additional education to the public on the budget process and the formula used to arrive at the cost-per-pupil statistic. The board agreed to refine its budget presentation next year, as well as include more information in the district’s monthly newsletter about the budget process and information about the cost per pupil.

Gluck said part of the process of compiling the report included members becoming more educated on the intricacies of educational policy, both locally and through state and federal law, and he said there were several surprises for members of the committee.

Low test scores, for example, had been a point of contention for residents at deliberative session, but most did not know that beyond a certain threshold of absences, students who opt out of testing are still recorded into the average with a score of zero, which may bring down the total proficiency score without accounting for how those students may have performed if they took the test.

One of the recommendations of the report was to better track and report the proficiency of students who actually took the test, analyze the root causes for students who opt out of testing and develop strategies to reduce the number of students who choose that option.

Another issue Gluck said members were surprised by was the structuring of charter schools, and that public schools were still responsible for providing services such as transportation and special education services to charter school students.

Gluck said many of these issues are highly complex, and would take significantly more time to explain to the public than is typically allowed in a budget hearing or deliberative session. The district has attempted to hold community conversations on various issues, but they are typically poorly attended, Gluck said. He said the hope is that the report serves as a way for residents to look at the data around the issues and become more informed.

The report is available on the Mascenic website, the Life in New Ipswich Facebook page and the New Ipswich Library website, and has been submitted to both New Ipswich and Greenville with requests that it be disseminated on their websites. A link to the full report is available at mascenic.org/article/2017633.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.