“Although the Region 4 Board believes that regionalization is in the best interest of our students, we’ve come to the conclusion that our communities have not reached a consensus on this issue, and so on June 8, the Region 4 Board unanimously voted to not send the regionalization plan forward to a referendum,” Board Chairman Chris Riley said in a prepared statement.

“Over the past several months, a number of community-minded people have worked very hard to develop a plan to make our outstanding school district even stronger. After hundreds of hours and over a dozen meetings, we’ve developed a plan that many of us believed would provide our kids with an even better education while making our governance structure more efficient,” Riley stated. “We would like to express our sincere thanks to [Superintendent of Schools] Dr. Ruth Levy and everyone who participated in this process for their enthusiasm, hard work, and commitment to our kids.”

Over the past several months, the board had put forth a full-throttle effort to garner support for regionalization, a subject that has been long-discussed. The goal was to regionalize kindergarten through 6th grade in Chester, Deep River, and Essex, much the way it is in the middle and high school, while leaving the three elementary schools in their own towns. Some of the proposed benefits of regionalization included reduced paper work and administrative needs, teacher sharing between the three schools, grant eligibility, cost sharing, and the reduction of the current 33 members needed on the five existing boards of education, down to 12 board members.

However, there was resistance in the creation of an inter-local agreement between the three towns, a cost-sharing arrangement that was needed to move forward with the regionalization plan. In addition, new legislature has been introduced that affects the creation of the regionalization plan and the economics that surround it. Therefore, based on town resistance, coupled with this new legislation, the board felt that not forwarding the issue to referendum was the right choice for right now.

“For years we have been asking the legislature for more flexibility to these rigid rules [regarding regionalization] so that we can come up with a plan that’s more compatible with our configuration. I served on Speaker Brendan Sharkey’s M.O.R.E. Commission, which was tasked with looking at these sorts of regional issues and he and his staff (along with Rep. Phil Miller) have been very responsive to helping us come up with better options,” said Essex Board of Education Chair Lon Seidman. “Right at the closing bell of this legislative session, some changes to the law were made that will give us the flexibility to define the funding methodology ourselves versus conforming to the state’s prior process.”

Seidman said the changes would affect many aspects of the yet-to-be determined inter-local agreement.

“This is important for two reasons: We can avoid the scenario that prompted the need for a complicated inter-local agreement, and towns can now have much stronger protections against school closures and grade configurations,” Seidman said. “Given the significance of this major change to the law, it makes sense to take a step back and see how this new approach might work. All of our efforts have been focused on finding ways around a very rigid law, but now we have the opportunity to actually define how we’d like to do this ourselves. It’s a huge change and a very different approach to what we’ve been working on for all of these years.”