A community group is seeking to bring residents of the Mascenic School District together to find solutions and middle ground after a contentious voting season.

Mitch Gluck started the group, which has about 17 members, after attending the district’s deliberative session, where voters cut the proposed budget by $1 million and hotly debated petition articles that sought to eliminate the superintendent’s position, impose a tax cap and hand the power to craft the district’s budget from the School Board to the Budget Committee.

“It kind of caught me by surprise,” Gluck said. “I was very disappointed by what I witnessed. It wasn’t so much that there was a real diversity of opinion about the budget and what the district was doing, but in my experience in previous years, questions were addressed and it moved forward. This year, I saw a lot of anger – a lot of anger – and pointing fingers. It felt ugly, and the divisiveness I witnessed felt like a microcosm of something larger in the community.”

After the March vote – in which residents voted in the now-higher default budget and rejected the petition articles – Gluck said he was still concerned about those divisions. He said he began to reach out to some community leaders, both in official capacities on town boards and some who were just well-known in the community, to propose a work group that would bring together both sides for in-depth discussions and problem-solving.

That group has now had three sessions, and has begun to break out subcommittees to tackle specific problems, Gluck said. The ultimate goal is to produce a report that will be advisory, but provide guidance to the School Board and administration moving forward.

“Our project will be designed to look at concerns and ferret out what is valid from what is not valid, based on facts and legitimate information we are able to gather,” Gluck said.

The work group has selected three areas to focus on for its initial outing: personnel, communication and community engagement and administration and finance. Gluck said the investigations of the subcommittees will direct the outcomes of those inquiries, but on a broad basis, for personnel, the group will meet with the teacher and support staff unions and look at issues such as turnover rate, morale, pay, support systems, behavior managements, retention and recruitment and policies, along with how they’re implemented.

The communications group will look at how to improve communication between families and the district, increasing transparency, community forums and why those who have chosen to leave the district did so. The administration and finance group will look at administrative functions, job overlaps or gaps, policies, flowchart some processes and look at the processes for the Budget Advisory Committee, including starting that process earlier.

“By no means do we expect to fix everything, but there is a way to address problems in a way where people collaborate, rather than become divided,” Gluck said.

Gluck said the group is entirely independent, but has met with the district and the New Ipswich Select Board. It includes School Board members Rachel Anderson and Tim Somero and New Ipswich Select Board Chair Shawn Talbot. Julie Lampinen, who was on the School Board before deciding not to run again this year, is also a member.

The large-group sessions of the committee meet on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m. at the Gates Recovery Center in the NeWest Mall on Turnpike Road in New Ipswich. The public is welcome to attend. While the group is not seeking new members, it will be seeking participants for focus groups on particular subjects in an anonymous basis.

Currently, the group is seeking parents with children in the Mascenic school system or who are being home-schooled, or who have children receiving education in an alternative education system, for three separate focus groups. People interested in participating should contact Gluck at mgluck1851@gmail.com with contact infsceniormation.

 Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.