Williamstown Elementary Says No to PARCC Test, Mount Greylock Weighs Option

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- The Williamstown Elementary School Committee has decided not to accept the commonwealth's offer to try out a new standardized test.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is in the middle of a two-year trial run for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers (PARCC) exam, a national exam that could eventually replace the well-established Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems (MCAS) testing.

DESE administered the PARCC exam in selected districts this spring and offered all districts the opportunity to use it in the 2014-15 academic year with the incentive that districts will not be penalized for poor performance on the experimental exam.

The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee also has discussed the possibility of going to PARCC but has decided to hold off on making a final decision.

Superintendent Rose Ellis advised the WES Committee that there was too much uncertainty surrounding the future prospects for PARCC to recommend implementation next year.

"The other concern I found out yesterday is [the state] may not adopt it anyway," Ellis told the elementary school panel on Wednesday. "They may just throw it out. I think Florida threw it out and developed its own."

PARCC is a national exam that is designed to align with the national Common Core standards, which Massachusetts has been implementing for several years. Another advantage of PARCC is that it allows for online test taking, although in next year's trial phase, the exam would have a pencil and paper option, Ellis told the Mount Greylock committee at its meeting on Tuesday.

At both meetings, Ellis indicated that the "Tri-District" schools -- WES, Mount Greylock and Lanesborough Elementary -- were aware of the possibility of a transition to PARCC but were not prepared to make the leap as soon as next year.

"Then we heard conversations about, 'Well, they're holding you harmless, and it's just a practice,' " Ellis said at the WES meeting, which was telecast on the town's community access television station, WilliNet.

Ellis also noted at both meetings that the three schools she serves as superintendent are rated either Level 1 or Level 2 according to their MCAS results. The idea of getting a "freebie" from the state by trying PARCC might be more appealing to Level 3 or Level 4 schools, she said.

"We do very well well anyway, and this will channel our energies in a way we're not prepared for," Ellis told the WES Committee.

Perhaps as important to her recommendation is the relatively new impression she had that PARCC is not an inevitability.

On Tuesday at the Mount Greylock meeting, she told the committee, "The state has been telling us, 'They're coming. Get ready.' "

Twenty-four hours later, she was talking about the prospect of PARCC being "thrown out," an idea that was supported by research conducted by a member of the WES Committee.

"There's a competing faction," Dan Caplinger said, perhaps referring to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which lists Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine among its governing states.

"It's sort of like the SAT and the ACT. Eventually you might have some resolution in that direction. ... It seems far less certain the state will move forward with this."

Unlike the WES Committee meeting, where a brief discussion focused mostly on the question of whether to move early to a test that may or may not be the standard in the commonwealth down the road, the Mount Greylock School Committee held a protracted discussion about the merits of the PARCC exam.

Committee member David Langston strongly espoused the merits of PARCC, which he characterized as vastly superior to the MCAS exam.

“I’ve always despised MCAS because of its deleterious effects on the educational process,” Langston said.

“PARCC is more linked to Common Core goals … so outcomes assessments have some kind of flexibility and robust goals toward which to move. MCAS goals I consider trivial and even retrograde for public education.”

Langston told the committee that was familiar with PARCC through his work as the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ representative to the PARCC working group in Massachusetts.

“In terms of the integrity of the educational goal, PARCC is better,” he said.

Mount Greylock School Committee member Robert Ericson asked whether the junior-senior high school would need to add computer terminals in order to accommodate online testing under PARCC. Ellis told him that would not be a concern in the short term as there will be a paper option for the next few years.

Mount Greylock Principal Mary MacDonald said she and Ellis were in agreement that the school would stay with paper and pencil tests for the near future regardless of the logistical concerns.

“You can’t suggest students do tests online when they haven’t done the majority of their learning online,” she said. “[The state] is trying to give us time to get the tools to help us when we move to electronic testing. I suspect it will be electronic testing in the next five years.”

Williamstown Yarn Store Bringing the Hobby Closer to Home

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
05:13AM / Monday, June 15, 2026

Gather sources some of its yarn from regional producers. 

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — If you knit, crochet, or want to pick up a new hobby with yarn, a new space is open to get your supplies.

On March 18, owners and friends Ashley Cart and Geraldine Shen opened Gather on Spring Street.

The two teach knitting classes at Williams College and thought it would be great to bring their hobby to life.

"We have always been avid knitters, and we've spent a lot of time together doing that, and find it to be for ourselves like this really wonderfully calming hobby," Shen said.

Shen said they see many people starting to take up the hobby and thought it would be great to open in location convenient for students and to give them a space to curate their work.

"We're finding a lot of interest amongst people to learn how to knit. Young people who want to get off their screens, find something that they can do with their hands, and so we have always talked about, like, wouldn't it be cool to one day do this," Shen said.

Shen said there aren't many options to buy yarn in the area, and often they're a long drive away. While they opened an online shop before finding a storefront, they recognized that for some knitters buying, online was not ideal.

"Yarn is one of those things that you do, at least the first time, want to see it in person, and like touch it, and look at it against your skin, or you know, color combinations, if you knit or crochet, just like to squeeze the yarn, and feel how squishy and soft it is, and so it is one of those things that you can't just easily buy online," she said.

Their new space is at 57 Spring St. on the third floor. An elevator at the Bank Street entrance can be taken straight to their door, it is especially readily accessible to the college students.

"We've sort of been working with Williams students, and we wanted to be accessible to them, because we really feel as though there's a renewed interest in this craft from younger folks, and that it can be a really good thing for them, and so we wanted to make it easy for Williams students to access the store, and they don't all have cars, they don't all leave campus much, so being on Spring Street was important to us," Shen said.

The store offers a variety of yarn and supplies, and a sit and stitch room where anyone can come in and hang out and work on their projects with others.

They buy yarn from local producers and offer other products as well.

"When people come through, like tourists and stuff, often they ask us what can you get here that you can't get anywhere else," said Shen. "So we have some yarns from local farms, we have some handspun by a local artist who's based in Lanesborough, we've got yarn from this woman who dyes it up in Brattleboro [Vt.], and so we're trying to highlight some of the really cool farms that we have around here."

One of the main opportunities they hope to expand on is being able to go into schools and teach children how to knit. They recently were awarded a grant to teach WIlliamstown Elementary School  fourth graders how to knit. Each child was able to make a square and Shen and Cart put all of the squares together and it is now hanging in their space when you walk in.

"We want to go into more schools and teach kids how to knit, because there's some really cool research that talks about, like, the benefits of teaching younger children how to knit. It helps them concentrate, it helps them calm down, and gives them a sense of accomplishment," Shen said.