BERK12 – or, Berkshire Educational Resources K-12 – was first known as the Berkshire County Education Task Force.
“The task force was originally formed in 2015, and a group of individuals came together representing schools and towns and folks from the general public who were working on responding to pressures at the schools we're facing regionally- And those pressures are really a couple of things," said project manager and former Pittsfield Public Schools superintendent Jake Eberwein. “One is declining enrollment. The second is limited resources in terms of aid from the state. So, as enrollment goes down, aid relatively stays flat, which means that additional funds to support the schools have got to be generated from the property owners. So, what we see is sort of a shifting burden from the state to the local property owners. Then all that, thirdly, ends up in decisions that districts have to make about staffing and programs.”
Eberwein says BERK12 is pursuing two strategies to address those challenges.
“One is the strategy that we can do collaborative work across districts to support the district capacity to ensure high quality access to programs, support for their educators, and in some cases, just generating collaborative funding requests for shared projects," he told WAMC. "And then the second piece is that we continue to support work in the area of districts who are interested in exploring more formal mergers, regionalization- and we’re currently doing that with the South County group, the regional school district planning board.”
Two years ago, BERK12 was prepared to act when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the county.
“We knew that the schools needed support delivering remote instruction," said Eberwein. "So we took it upon ourselves to write a proposal that would create a consortium of schools in purchasing a common learning management system, having training and support. And we ended up writing a proposal, pitching it across the state, and we got state funding for it. That was the sort of thing where we identified the need and then went after the funding. In some cases, the funding comes in, and we figure out where the funding might work to close the gap.”
This spring, BERK12 and 11 Berkshire County school districts received a $300,000 Rural Innovation and Efficiencies Grant from Massachusetts. Eberwein chalks up the accomplishment to the kind of regional collaboration BERK12 is intended to foster.
“Kids need to have access and exposure to career awareness opportunities, career exploratory opportunities, and career immersion opportunities," he told WAMC. "So everything from job shadows to very intensive internships. And the idea is that is not for any one subset of students. It's really a necessity for all students, whether they're going directly from high school to work or into college and then ultimately into the world of work.”
The participating districts are Berkshire Hills, Central Berkshire, Clarksburg, Farmington River Regional, Florida, Hancock, Hoosac Valley Regional, Lee-Tyringham, Mount Greylock Regional, Berkshire Arts and Technology public charter school, and Southern Berkshire Regional School District.
“This particular grant is going to be supporting the expansion of College and Career Readiness Teams at high schools, and in some cases, middle schools across the county," explained Eberwein. "There already is a network established, but this will expand that network. So it'll provide the ability for the teams to work across district, for training to occur.”
Eberwein says the money will be distributed relatively equally across the districts through shared trainings and as the CCR teams are roughly the same size from school to school. For in-field job training, the participating districts, BERK12, and MassHire will work to support as many students as possible proportionally.
Some of the funding will help young people land internships.
“We want to see kids having opportunities to work during the summer and during the school year, be paid for that work, for the receiving organizations, businesses, and social service agencies, nonprofits, to be trained to accept students and work effectively with the interns and for interns to be trained on expectations of what they're going to experience when they go into the field,” said Eberwein.
Eberwein’s vision of education in the Berkshires isn’t just about preparing the next generation to enter a rocky and shifting job market.
“Selfishly as a region, we also want to get our kids connected to opportunities here in the Berkshires," he said. "So the more we can put kids into situations in which they see themselves working and living in the Berkshires, the more likely we are to retain the talent that we have here. As we know, historically, we've lost talent in the 20 to 30 band, as they head to Boston and D.C. and New York City and other bigger markets. But we continue to maintain, as do our economic partners, that there are a lot of opportunities right here in Berkshire County. And I think we're starting to see the needle turn a little bit, and the more we can get kids in the field, helping them to understand what's possible here, the more likely we are to keep them.”
