After shakeup, Frontier Senior Center reorganizes

By Bob Dunn Bulletin Contributing Writer

Published on December 25, 2009

A commitment to reorganize and revitalize the Frontier Senior Center is at the forefront of its Board of Oversight's agenda.

"This will be a ‘born again' senior center," said board Chairman Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards said that the board has drafted a memorandum of understanding that will explicitly spell out duties and responsibilities of the center's director, as well as establish the organizational infrastructure of the center.

That memorandum is in an early draft form and will have to be approved by the town meetings of the three communities served by the South Deerfield center: Whately, Deerfield and Sunderland.

One duty of the board will be to help invigorate the senior communities of the three towns and get them more involved in the center and what it has to offer.

Part of the challenge of the center's mission to serve as many area seniors as possible is that the community is a large and diverse one.

The center has begun asking for input from seniors to determine what they hope to get out of the center and what kind of activities they would like to see there.

That input will come from surveys which have already been conducted in Whately and Sunderland and from simple, but overlooked, additions to the center like a suggestion box.

Edwards said he expects Deerfield to conduct a similar survey.

The board has also named an interim director for the center, Lisa Ballou, of Deerfield.

Edwards said that once the memorandum is approved and the director's position is established, he or she will be empowered to make decisions about the center's operations, but will be accountable for those decisions to the board.

In June, Deerfield Town Meeting voted to eliminate a large portion of its contribution to former director Karen Herold's salary. Herold stayed on at the position after the Deerfield cut until late October, retaining the same part-time pay of $15 per-hour for a 15-hour week.

The portion of her pay that was cut at the Town Meeting came from state grant money.

Edwards said that the center has operated for years without anyone having a clear idea how financial and managerial decisions should be made, which, in turn, led to a slow degradation of services.

"We were dismissing a huge part of our population, inadvertently," Edwards said.

Currently, Edwards said, the center is only open three days a week from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. "It needs to be more than that," Edwards said. "We have to figure out how to expand its function in tight budget times."

Edwards said that the new commitment to shoring up the organizational structure, even before the memorandum is finished and approved, is starting to make a difference.

"We're already starting to see changes; there's a sense that there's a new climate (at the center)," Edwards said.

Edwards cites last month's Thanksgiving lunch that filled the building to capacity as an example. "That's unheard of," he said.

The board is composed of Edwards, representing Whately, Mark Gilmore, of Deerfield, and Thomas Fydenkevez, of Sunderland.

The board was formed after the Deerfield Town Meeting voted to eliminate the center's director salary, Edwards said.

"We have an organizational, marketing and funding task ahead of us," Edwards said. "This is just the beginning."