Greetings to the Monty Tech Community,

Once again, with the arrival of September, I am thrilled to welcome all students, families, faculty and staff back to Monty Tech for another wonderful school year. It is my sincere hope that all members of our community enjoyed a relaxing and uplifting summer season. While the summer months are much quieter around the campus, I can assure you that the staff who run our summer programs, along with the custodians, assistants, and administrators who work year round, have been busying readying our school for everyone’s return.

Personally, I am excited to proudly begin my third year as Monty Tech’s Superintendent-Director, and my eleventh year overall as part of this community. As always, we have developed a wide-variety of new programs and initiatives for our students and, in some cases, the residents of our 18 cities and towns, and I am confident that Monty Tech will continue to be a leader in the areas of workforce development in northern Worcester County.

To begin, as I introduced last year, Monty Tech has launched a program in partnership with some of our surrounding communities as well as the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) that we feel will eventually become a model that will be replicated across the commonwealth. The program is formally known as the Montachusett Vocational Partnership, but it is more familiarly known as the MVP Academy.

It has been frequently documented that, due to the limited capacity of our school facility, Monty Tech can only accept around 350 or 360 students each year. However, in recent years, Monty Tech has accepted applications for well over 800 students. Thus, regrettably, our school must place well over 50% of our applicants on a waitlist for acceptance, and a large number of those students will never be offered acceptance. This reality is one of the most challenging aspects of working in vocational education, as we would prefer to provide workforce training to all of these applicants and, similarly, provided many more highly skilled employees to our industry partners in northern Worcester county. Our new MVP Academy goal is to address these concerns.

Without going too deeply into the particulars of the program, the MVP Academy is our soon-to-be-completed satellite facility housed at 270 Westminster Street in Fitchburg, approximately 1.5 miles from our main building. Inside this facility, Monty Tech instructors and students from our construction trades are creating, what will eventually be, three shop programs – House Carpentry, Electrical and Plumbing (to be added in 2025). The students who will be trained in these programs will be in two categories. During the day, Seniors and Juniors enrolled in our partnering districts of Fitchburg, Gardner and Narragansett Regional will receive vocational training during one week and academic instruction with their sending district on the other. Meanwhile, at night and in partnership with the Monty Tech School of Continuing Education, adult students will receive training through programs such as the state’s Career Technical Initiative (CTI). It is our hope, when this program demonstrates success, that Monty Tech can develop similar satellite training facilities throughout our other communities.

Again, we fully recognize that state-level officials are following our efforts to make MVP Academy successful, and we will certainly be sharing more as we move forward. With that said, I want to make sure that all families know that, as we start the year, there will be one significant change to the program. While we strive to complete the renovations at 270 Westminster St. as soon as possible, the instructors and students of MVP Academy will join us on the main campus as they begin their instruction. Please be assured that their presence on campus will not cause any disruptions to the teaching and learning of the students enrolled at Monty Tech. Our goal is to have the MVP program officially at its renovated facility by late Fall.  

In addition, Monty Tech administrators, faculty and staff will be working on the following efforts throughout the 2024-2025 school year –

• After completing a safety audit of the Monty Tech campus last year, we have taken several steps to address identified concerns. Thus, students will notice newly installed security gates at the back of the school as well as new speed bumps in several parts of our parking lots. In addition, in September, Monty Tech will be renovating our main lobby in such a way that guests and visitors will be unable to access our facility until their ID has been reviewed at the main office. Lastly, administration has rewritten the overall Campus Safety plan to ensure that the necessary safety related personnel are in place and that all personnel have updated response plans to a wide variety of scenarios.

• Looking ahead, in 2026, Monty Tech will seek to renew its decennial accreditation through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). Prior to the official visit, our school will need to begin its self-study process to gather evidence of our successes and alignment with NEASC’s expectations. In the past, NEASC focused on the school’s commitment to a mission statement. However, NEASC now looks for two essential elements in the self-study which are the school’s Core Values and a Portrait of a Graduate, the characteristics and distinct traits of a student who has received their diploma from Monty Tech. The effort to develop those elements will involve all of our school stakeholders.

• Monty Tech will continue to remain focused on developing our students’ overall skills and readiness to identify a postsecondary pathway after graduation. Recent data has indicated that we are having great success in ensuring that students can choose from multiple pathways. For example, in terms of directly entering the workforce, Monty Tech set a new record for the number of students who participated in our co-operative education program which allows students to work in their vocational field during their shop week with pay. In 2023-2024, 235 students – or 1-in-3 of all Juniors/Seniors – were enrolled in Co-op. Meanwhile, Monty Tech continues to partner with Worcester State to offer no cost dual enrollment post-secondary courses. Further, we have expanded our Advanced Placement offerings to include AP Physics and AP Psychology where, if a student received a qualifying score, the student may earn college credits that will save the student tuition money.

These are just a sample of the initiatives that Monty Tech will be focused on during the upcoming year, and I can assure everyone that our entire faculty and staff are committed to providing the optimum vocational learning environment that will allow our students to pursue whatever post-graduate pathway they choose.

As we step forward to begin the journey that will encompass the 2024-2025 school year, I wish everyone in our school community all the best throughout the year.

Best Regards,

Tom Browne

Superintendent-Director

Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School District