I spent a bit of time over the weekend watching the recording of last month’s first meeting of the Community Engagement Subcommittee of the Greenfield School Committee.

This subcommittee is newly formed and is chaired by Elizabeth DeNeeve and includes School Committee members Melodie Goodwin and Stacey Sexton.

I missed the School Committee discussions that led to the formation of this subcommittee. Time permitting, I may go back and find those, but my sense is that it is a response to a sentiment that seems to have formed around Greenfield that the School Committee is disconnected from the public. I suspect the recent budget fight with the mayor and the City Council over the FY26 school budget (which led to the resignation of the superintendent of the schools) played into as well.

There also seems to be general feeling that communications around the School Committee and the school district in general are not (and have not been) great, an issue that seems to have grown particularly acute over the summer and running into he start of the new school year.

The meeting kicked off with a conversation about how (and whether) this subcommittee and the School Committee more broadly should be interacting with the City Council. This subcommittee has been invited to join the upcoming meeting of the Community Relations Committee of the City Council, and right off, member Goodwin raised concerns about to what degree the School Committee should be coordinating *at all* with the City Council.

The concerns she voiced seemed to be about keeping the School Committee nonpolitical and that “the City Council is the politics of the city.” Member Goodwin also seemed concerned that there was some agenda on the part of the City Council, and also that it was not even appropriate for the two bodies to be talking.

While I am not an expert, I am pretty sure that as long as the joint meeting of the two committees does not represent a quorum of either the School Committee or the City Council, there is nothing in Massachusetts Open Meeting Law that prohibits these sorts of conversations. Chair DeNeeve noted that  in municipalities all around the state, committees and boards doing similar work do plenty of coordination.

From here, the conversation turned to more practical matters.

It sounds like there has been ongoing discussion within the School Committee about calendar confusion across the district—what is happening at each of the schools, what is happening at the district level, and what the School Committee is doing. How can they better coordinate the calendars so that families and residents can more easily understanding what is happening when and where within the schools?

The talk here—which included the interim superintendent—turned to the practical matters of shared calendaring platforms like Google Calendar and Powerschool, as well as the schools’ use of the Smore newsletter platform. The details of all of these tools aside, they also touched on the lack of consistency in who uses which tool, training for their usage, and the maintenance of calendar and communication practices over time.  All of these areas have been a challenge across school years, superintendents, and the turnover of staff in the school and the administration.

On a related topic, the subcommittee began discussing social media presence and usage, prompted by the fact that TMS—the consultancy/service-provider that the district uses for a bunch of stuff—bills Greenfield around $3000 a month for social media services.

I have heard and seen that number quoted in a few forums around town recently. I can’t speak to its provenance, but from the discussion at this meeting, it sounds like no one is quite sure what it covers or what service is actually being provided by TMS.

More broadly, the School Committee does not have a social media presence and whatever information is being posted to social media is being done by individuals, with Chair DeNeeve mentioning that she had been doing that herself until she got too busy to keep up with it. There was some discussion among the members of to what degree the School Committee needs or wants to be involved with the district social media usage, although there seemed to be general agreement that it would be good to get a better idea of how the School Committee and district are handling social media and what sort of engagement they are getting.

With that, the subcommittee wrapped up and adjourned their meeting. I will keep an eye on agendas to see whether the joint session with the Community Relations Committee ends up happening and if so, how it goes.