In Greenfield, a battle is brewing over the future of the city’s public schools ahead of Tuesday’s election in which three four-year terms on the School Committee are up for grabs.
The race has pitted a progressive-backed slate of candidates against another group of three who coalesced into their own slate in response. And while the six hopefuls agreed on some items at a forum earlier this week, like supporting state legislation banning religious exemptions for vaccines, several key differences separate them. Among them are debates over the schools’ finances and whether to place a police officer in Greenfield Public Schools.
The election comes as cities and towns across the region are grappling with decisions about how to fund their schools amid rising costs and the failure of state and federal leaders to boost funding to meet the moment. In recent years, Belchertown, for example, passed a tax override to avoid layoffs in their school districts while political leaders in other municipalities, like Northampton, sent educators pink slips.
In Greenfield, the city avoided the worst of staffing cuts in 2023, when city councilors — including Virginia “Ginny” Desorgher — pushed back against a cut of $1.5 million that then-mayor Roxann Wedegartner proposed to the School Committee’s budget. The City Council was able to restore nearly $1.2 million, avoiding all but two layoffs.
But this year, it’s Desorgher who’s the mayor. And just like Wedegartner before her, she’s now facing criticism from progressives for what they see as conservative budgeting.
Earlier this year, Desorgher’s budget came in at $1.9 million under what the School Committee had initially requested. She, like other leaders across the region, said at the time that she was concerned with a massive spike in insurance costs and uncertainty about funding coming from the state and federal government. The School Committee then made an additional $350,000 request. Desorgher — who also sits on the committee — called the request “unsettling,” questioning what the money was for. Ultimately, she and School Committee member Melodie Goodwin voted against the resolution, which passed with four “yes” votes.
Desorgher did not respond to an interview request Thursday.
When the City Council met to finalize the budget in May, unionized educators spoke out in favor of more education funding. One of them, Anna McBain, called the mayor’s budget “wrong” and said it would lead more students to choose to leave the district and further strain the district’s already understaffed special-education and social-emotional resources.
“When the mayor says that we’re overfunded, we’re not,” McBain said. “We’re, in fact, severely underfunded, and if you guys can’t come up with a bigger number we’re going to be even more out of compliance with the laws and we’re going to lose more students.”
But there were others who supported the mayor and her questioning of the School Committee’s $350,000 request. Goodwin, for example, said that as a member of the School Committee she didn’t know what that money was going to pay for. She called for greater transparency in the school’s budgeting, as did city resident David Moscaritolo, who chairs the city’s Public Safety Commission. He described the district as top-heavy and called for fewer administrators. He also questioned, without evidence, whether the district’s business manager was committing “fraud.”
“I’m for the schools, but we need to be fiscally responsible,” he said. “We need to manage our money, we need to use our resources effectively, and we need ethics … Do we have ethics in the administration of the school department and the School Committee? I don’t think so.”
When Precinct 9 City Councilor Derek Helie brought the School Committee’s request to the council chambers, five councilors voted against the increase, denying it the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. Those voting against the $350,000 were Michael Terounzo, Wahab Minhas, Michael Mastrototaro, John Bottomley, and William Perry.
It is in that context that voters head to the polls on Tuesday with a choice between two slates of candidates who seem to fall into different camps in that debate. And with searches ongoing for a new superintendent and a dedicated business manager — the district currently hires an outside consultant for that work — the seven-member School Committee will have big decisions to make.
Three candidates are running on a slate that has the backing of several left-leaning groups in the city. They are: current School Committee member Elizabeth DeNeeve, Pioneer Valley Regional School Spanish teacher Jeffrey Diteman, and Stoneleigh-Burnham School math teacher Adrienne Craig-Williams.
Those candidates finished top three in a September preliminary election in which six candidates moved on to the general election, eliminating one candidate.
Doug Selwyn leads the education task force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, which has endorsed that slate. He said some of their opponents have made “nasty” and unfounded accusations against school leaders instead of seeking to collaborate with others on a budgeting problem municipalities across the region have faced.
“They’re on a witch hunt for that corrupt person that’s ruining the schools,” said Jon Magee, an organizer with Greenfield People’s Budget, which has also backed the progressive slate. Instead, Magee said, candidates should be focused on a systemic understanding of what’s causing financial difficulties in the schools. He and Selwyn praised Deneeve, for example, for working to collaborate with the City Council, reaching out to other districts experiencing budget shortfalls, and connecting with lawmakers who could help with more state funding.
“There is no bogey man,” Magee said. “Nobody could be responsible on their own for the situation that’s going on in our schools.”
After the preliminary election, the candidates who finished fourth, fifth, and sixth came together to form their own slate: Goodwin, Moscaritolo, and Terounzo.
“A lot of people don’t know what’s going on, or how a lot of this stuff works, and I’m just really concerned about the funding that we have being spent appropriately and not wastefully — especially that we’re getting the children what they need in the schools, and that that includes not only their programming, but making sure [instructional assistants] are funded,” Terounzo told The Greenfield Recorder. “The three of us have that in mind — making it very clear where the money’s going before it gets published as a budget, asking the questions at a more appropriate time, making sure that you know the finances are being spent appropriately and responsibly.”
None of the six candidates returned The Shoestring’s phone messages left Thursday. They all did, however, take part in a candidate forum earlier this week.
On the issue of school funding, Moscaritolo, Terounzo, and Goodwin all spoke in favor of hiring a company to audit the district.
“We currently spend $200,000 on a company to manage our money,” Goodwin said. “And that’s been going on for six years. It’s time to see what’s been going on.”
DeNeeve, meanwhile, said that the state audits the district yearly and that it wouldn’t make sense to spend more than $100,000 on a third-party audit.
“I think that in order to make things more transparent and have the community feel more comfortable about the way their money is being spent, it would be more useful to hire a dedicated budget manager, as other candidates have pointed out, and make sure that that person is writing the budget in a way that regular people can understand it and read it,” Diteman said.
The two groups also split on the subject of bringing a police officer into the city’s schools. Often known as “school resource officers,” or SROs, those positions have generated controversy in some districts in the region, some of which — like Northampton — have banned them.
Diteman and DeNeeve both said the School Committee should listen to the community about the issue, and DeNeeve said that when the issue came up twice during her tenure on the School Committee, the elected officials “heard resoundingly from our constituents through email and public comment that they did not want an SRO in the schools.”
“I believe having a person with a gun in a school is a bad idea. Period,” Craig-Williams said. “And the evidence shows that they do not make schools safer.”
Moscaritolo, meanwhile, said that while he’s on the fence about the issue, the district should be open to it, mentioning a cafeteria fight that happened at Greenfield High School last year. Goodwin said that bullying needs to be addressed in the schools. And though she acknowledged that that issue isn’t addressed by a school resource officer, she said that without one, “we need to look at alternatives, especially in the area of discipline.”
“Does it have to be an armed person? Maybe, maybe not,” Terounzo said. “There have been communities, local communities, that have had someone like that who have done wonders for a lot of children, especially in high school age. If you get the right people in there, it’s not a threat anymore … My kids are in elementary school. They’re not afraid of, you know, cops and firemen and all that stuff. I think that the emergency services engagement that we have growing up is what we need to work on a little bit better to build that trust back after so much has been broken by a lot of things across the nation.”
The police have made their presence felt in another way in the election, too.
Last month, a Facebook account going by Jimmy Keno posted on a popular Greenfield Facebook page a video of police showing up to DeNeeve’s house at around 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 1. The officer accused her of putting a bag of trash in a City Hall dumpster, which he said amounted to illegal dumping, but that he wasn’t charging her. Keno also posted an email exchange between DeNeeve and Todd Dodge, Greenfield’s police chief, days after the incident.
In the Oct. 6 email to Dodge, DeNeeve said she felt “specifically targeted for this treatment because it is an election year.” Dodge denied that, praising the “professionalism” of the officer, who he said didn’t know who DeNeeve was. He told DeNeeve that what she did was also a violation of state ethics law, but that the city wouldn’t file a complaint against her. He also said that he spoke to Desorgher about the incident and that she didn’t want DeNeeve to suffer consequences for the incident.
A day after that email exchange, somebody filed a public records request with the city, asking for the responding officer’s body-camera footage.
Greenfield’s online public records portal shows that the city received the request at around 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 7 and that the police department immediately released the footage at 6 a.m. the next morning.
All of Greenfield’s nine precincts vote in the Greenfield High School gym at 21 Barr Ave. Voting hours are 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Dusty Christensen is The Shoestring's investigations editor. Based in western Massachusetts, his award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in newspapers and on radio stations across the region. He has reported for outlets including The Nation magazine, NPR, Haaretz, New England Public Media, The Boston Globe, The Appeal, In These Times, and PBS. He teaches journalism to future muckrakers at both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College. Send story tips to: dchristensen@theshoestring.org.
