Pittsfield and Taconic High Schools’ football co-op plan is a textbook — or should we say playbook? — example of an opportunity for shared services that the Berkshires’ largest school district is wise to pursue.
The Generals and Thunder will join forces beginning next season in football, with the co-op hosted by Taconic.
Whether we like it or not, the landscape of public education is rapidly shifting, especially in rural corners of the commonwealth like ours. In many school communities, enrollment is declining while per-pupil costs are rising. So, in many ways it makes sense to merge the city’s high school football programs under the Thunder banner (they would play at Taconic), since it’s easier and more cost-efficient to field and equip one team.
Still, we know some measures that make modern sense can clash with tradition. Smart shared service plans between schools (or between districts) can sometimes raise prickly questions about how families and alumni can continue identifying with a school’s spirit or their “home team.”
One might think the instinct toward parochialism might be most palpable in sports-related considerations of shared services. On the other hand, the field of play is where statistical reality is most stark. For myriad reasons nowadays, it’s simply harder and more expensive to field a football team. The equipment costs are higher than many other sports, and meanwhile the pool of students pursuing any given sport is further divided by an increasingly wide array of scholastic athletics and other programs are attracting students’ finite extracurricular attention.
In fact, it’s on the gridiron where we’ve most recently seen inroads for shared service opportunities that until recently were highly unlikely among Berkshire school communities. The PHS and Taconic football co-op plan comes on the heels of another team-up that might have been unthinkable even a few years ago: Drury, Hoosac Valley and Mount Greylock high schools suiting up with the same jersey. It’s worth noting that three-way team merger served as prologue to ongoing discussions about broader regionalization possibilities in Northern Berkshire.
To be sure, that inter-district collaboration isn’t perfectly comparable to the PHS-Taconic football co-op between two schools that already share a city and district. We don’t think a joint football squad in Pittsfield will prompt a push to reorganize secondary education in Pittsfield Public Schools. Still, it shows a common and welcome acceptance of a now undeniable reality: The landscape is rapidly shifting beneath the foundations of our county’s public schools and the vital programs and services they offer. Those paradigm shifts are sometimes difficult to face, but districts do have to deal with them. Given the other challenges Pittsfield Public Schools has recently faced, uniting the city’s cheers for the home team at football games would be a welcome bonus to the efficiency this team-up entails.