A letter was sent recently to the ConVal superintendent and School Board by the Francestown School Committee addressing misleading information that had been presented by the School Board in public presentations and requesting the backup data used to inform their public presentations.

In response, Jim Fredrickson, Sharon’s school board rep, addressed the letter in a thorough and objective manner at the March 4 school board meeting. Our committee would like to take a moment to publicly apologize to Fredrickson for putting him in the position to have to defend the work he has produced during the withdrawal process.

Fredrickson has been dedicated and fair in providing financial facts without bias. He has likely put in hundreds of hours to deconstruct and untangle district and SAU costs that were previously intertwined.

As part of his response, Fredrickson admitted a mistake in his calculations which highlights his honesty and transparency. The financial model that was created is extremely complex, and during a recent update to that model, a piece of data was missed that helped explain an increase to ConVal’s estimate of the cost for a multi-district SAU.

Our committee made a mistake in missing the full depth of this update and apologize to Fredrickson for this error. Our committee stands by the intent of our letter, which was to draw attention to the misleading information that has been presented to the public, but wants to emphasize that MFredrickson has shown nothing but the highest character during this process.

Laura Mafera

Francestown School Committee