To the editor:
At our September 11, 2025 meeting, we, the Berkshire Hills Regional School District School Committee, unanimously voted to approve a ballot question and endorse the construction of a new Monument Mountain Regional High School building at the existing site to be funded in part by the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). Voters will be asked to approve the project on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. We endorse the Massachusetts School Building Authority-funded project because it is the best option for our students, for taxpayers, and for our community.
Monument Mountain was built in 1968, and while the building has been well maintained, it is now obsolete and at the end of its life cycle. It is no longer safe and is incredibly cost inefficient. More importantly, despite the brilliant work of teachers and staff, the building is disadvantaging our students and preventing us from moving forward with the next generation of vocational and college preparatory education our students and our local economy deserve. Every other high school of its era in Berkshire County has been rebuilt or renovated. The district commissioned a construction cost estimator firm to study our options. They determined that the cost of necessary repairs that we would have to undertake to simply bring the building in compliance with modern codes and laws would be $89 million. The cost of this “Base-Repair” or “Code-Upgrade” would not receive any state funding, so the cost would fall directly to taxpayers.
The proposed project that we now submit to voters has been planned for over three years by the School Committee; the local building committee made up of officials and volunteers from all three towns; the MSBA; and professionally retained architects, engineers, data analysis, cost estimators, and financial analysts. The proposal is for a new three-story high school just west of the current building partially set into the existing hill to reduce the building’s overall scale. Once the new school is complete, the existing building will be demolished to make way for improved parking, circulation, and new fields. The construction will not interrupt school operations at the existing building. Most importantly, the new building will be fully ADA accessible, net-zero ready, and equipped with modern design and security features to protect our students.
Monument is one of the largest high schools in Berkshire County and serves, and will continue to serve, a lot of students. The MSBA has been running accurate estimates of school enrollments for a long time, and it has determined that a future Monument should be built to serve 485 students per year. This is in line with the numbers served by the new Wahconah High School in Dalton and the new Mount Greylock High School in Williamstown.
The building will include expanded and modernized vocational spaces for the existing Automotive, Horticulture, and Early Childhood Education programs, bringing those popular programs in line with their much newer counterparts in northern Berkshire County. The project will also enable us to add an entirely new vocational program to train the next generation of electricians. Academic and CVTE classrooms will be adjacent rather than siloed, allowing for greater integration. Science labs, a welcoming library/media center, and an ample auditorium/community gathering space will all be brought up to modern specifications. To put it simply, this new building will allow us to continue and build upon our nationally ranked college preparatory program and dramatically expand our vocational offerings to rival any CVTE program in the state. Additionally, the new building will be designed and accessible to many community needs and events, much like the original building was in its early years.
We made the final decision to put the new building project to voters after the MSBA affirmatively voted to provide between $59 and $61 million in funding to the project on August 27. The MSBA funding represents the largest single investment by the state in the district and the southern Berkshire economy in history. Also, the district received $1.6 million in incentives from Mass Save. The total cost of the project will be $152 million, so with the MSBA’s contribution and the Mass Save grant, the local share of the obligation will be $89 to $91 million, almost exactly what it will cost us to bring the existing building up to code. The local share will be funded through a fixed-rate, 30-year bond, therefore spreading out the cost and stabilizing the impact on taxpayers.
The building project, in partnership with the MSBA, is a generational opportunity and investment in our future. It makes the most financial sense because, as counterintuitive as it sounds, a new building will cost us less than fixing the old one. More importantly, like the first iteration of Monument Mountain, it will secure the viability of our community for generations. It will provide a world-class education to generations of students, provide a skilled workforce that will fuel our local economy, and continue to be the anchor that retains and attracts working families.
BHRSD School Committee members:
Stephen Bannon
Chair
Richard Dohoney
Vice Chair
Sarah Bourla
Diane Singer
William Vogt
Andrew Potter
Jason St. Peter
William Fields
Alison Read
Sarah Tonetti
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