Two-time U.S. women's chess champion and author of "Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport," Jennifer Shahade will give a lecture titled "Leveling the Chessboard: Women in Competitive Chess" on Sunday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m. The event, which will be held at Griffin Hall, room 3, on the Williams College campus, is free and open to the public.
Following the lecture, Shahade will play 20 simultaneous chess games in Griffin 4. Participants who give her the most challenge will receive signed copies of her book. Those interested in signing up should contact Trevor Murphy at tmurphy@williams.edu.
Shahade, a Woman Grand Master who has an FIDE rating of 2322, is considered by some to be the strongest female player ever born and raised in the U.S. In 1998, she became the first female to win the U.S. Junior Open. She then proceeded to win the U.S. Women's Chess Championship in 2002 and 2004.
Shahade's 2005 book, "Chess Bitch," is a controversial but critically acclaimed investigation of young women in chess today. The book profiles international chess players and explores trends and biases in the game.
This Brooklyn-based chess expert is also the web editor in chief for the United States Chess Federation. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications. In 2005, the New York Times carried an op-ed by Shahade, in which she suggests that chess in the U.S. can and should be popularized in a manner similar to the mainstream presentation of poker, a game she also plays competitively.
Shahade who holds a B.A. in comparative literature from NYU teaches chess and is involved in performance art.
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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint
By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.
The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.
That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.
"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.
"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."
For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.
"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."
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The incumbent, John Barrett III, and Andrew Fitch, a North Adams city councilor, met in a theater at Williams College's Paresky Center in a forum sponsored by the town's chapter of the League of Women Voters. click for more
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