NORTHAMPTON — R. Downey Meyer wishes more people would think about the schools and the work of the School Committee.
“It’s strange to me how little attention these issues get,” he said.
Meyer, 51, has served on the School Committee for the past eight years and is running for a fourth two-year term. He currently teaches high school science at Mohawk Trail Regional School, a profession he came to after becoming dissatisfied with his work as a lawyer.
Meyer will face challenger Elena Daniell, a write-in candidate, for the Ward 7 position at Tuesday’s municipal election.
Meyer moved to Northampton in 2005 and has two sons — a freshman at Northampton High School and an eighth-grader at JFK Middle School.
Meyer got involved in school issues in 2009, when the school budget was facing a substantial financial hole.
“At that point I believe that the number of projected layoffs was over 30,” he recalled.
In order to prevent these cuts, Meyer joined the effort to pass a Proposition 2½ override in the city, and was made the Ward 7 captain for the campaign.
“We won a pretty resounding victory,” he said.
After the override’s passage, he was approached about running for the open Ward 7 School Committee seat, and was elected unopposed in 2009.
“I have continued on it because I think the work is really important,” he said.
Meyer said he is running again because there’s been a good amount of turnover on the School Committee, and that his experience is valuable. Currently, he is the second-most senior member. He ran unopposed in the previous three elections, but said having an opponent gives him the opportunity to speak about issues facing the schools.
Asked about the biggest challenge facing Northampton schools, Meyer said it is resources. Specifically, he pointed to the budget, which he said could face a more than $500,000 shortfall in fiscal 2021.
“We’re going to need relief in some way,” he said.
He pointed to the Fair Share Amendment, also known as the millionaire’s tax, as a possible source of relief.
“If it passes, it changes this picture significantly,” he said.
Meyer supported successful overrides in 2009 and 2013. However, he said that he would prefer not to solve the school’s budgetary issues with another one.
Meyer noted the challenge in schools, as elsewhere, around equity and the achievement gap, as it relates to low-income students, special needs students and minority students, and that he hasn’t seen a lot of progress over the last eight years in Northampton.
“You haven’t seen it (progress) statewide, you haven’t seen it nationwide,” he said.
He noted the recent adoption of the co-teaching model and the inclusion model at the elementary school level as a positive step in this direction. The co-teaching model involves having two educators in a classroom in order to allow special needs students to be educated in the same classrooms as their peers, also known as the inclusion model.
He also said that he received a number of letters from parents who said that they had had good experiences with schools that use the inclusion model.
As for the dispute between the Northampton Association of School Employees and the School Committee over paid release time for the union’s president, Meyer said that the two sides met again on Oct. 24. “We’ll continue negotiating and … see what happens,” he said. Meyer was a member of the subcommittee that previously negotiated the issue with the NASE. He is also a member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
Bera Dunau can be reached at bdunau@gazettenet.com.