Letter: Jennifer Macksey for Mayor

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To the Editor:

I am writing to encourage you to cast your vote for Jennifer Macksey as the next mayor of North Adams. I have worked very closely with Jennifer in matters of the Northern Berkshire School Union. Jennifer's success rate for improving our schools has been 100 percent.

I am the chairperson for the Northern Berkshire School Union's joint school committees. Jennifer was hired as business manager for NBSU with her main goal to write grants for the five town school districts. Jennifer went way above and beyond finding grant money for all of the schools. To Jennifer's position as business manager, assistant superintendent was added to her job description as she was able to receive building grants and then proceeded to oversee the projects from bids to final completion. Jennifer has done an amazing job working with all five towns in the NBSU. Jennifer is always there with answers and suggestions to improve all of the school communities.

On the business manager side of her job, Jennifer has been able to organize all of the individual budgets for each school and was able to set up an account so each of the shared employees did not have to receive five different checks from five different towns that belong to the NBSU. Jennifer's accounting skills have enabled the towns to file end of year reports for their schools. Jennifer has always met all grant deadlines and has made sure that all NBSU bills are paid in a timely fashion.

Leadership and compassion are two words that I would use to describe Jennifer. Jennifer has the ability to evaluate situations and she has incredible skills with which to make professional decisions. Jennifer has strong, effective, decision making skills. Jennifer has a passion for service.

Jennifer has been personally connected to North Adams her entire life. She has been a resident of North Adams, an employee in the City of North Adams, an employee in MCLA, vice president of Southern Vermont College and is currently the assistant superintendent/business manager of the Northern Berkshire School Union, which serves five towns and four schools. Jennifer has the best interests for the City of North Adams in her decision to be mayor of North Adams.

Judith Oleson
Florida, Mass. 

Judith Oleson is chair of the Abbott Memorial School Committee and the Northern Berkshire School Union Committee. 

 

 

 

 

 


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Drury High Weighting Grades for Honor Society

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Drury High School's honor societies will take into account access to early college when calculating grades. 
 
The School Committee last Tuesday approved new language in the student handbook that reflect the changes.
 
"We were talking about how honor roll and Pro Merito and Nu Sigma is calculated, and we realized that even though we have weighted GPAs for taking more difficult courses for our students, we didn't actually factor that into who was eligible for honor roll or the Honor Society," Principal Stephanie Kopala explained to the committee last week. 
 
The school's always used unweighted averages in determining honor roll status and who is inducted into the Honor Society, which predates the National Honor Society. On the other hand, class rank has used weighted grades.
 
Since Drury has become an early college high school and Kopala said the majority of students are now taking college classes as high school students "and we're not factoring in the fact that they're taking these challenging courses."
 
"They might not necessarily be getting that 3.5 or that 4.0 average that they would have gotten if they had taken honors or AP classes, which is why we put the weighting in to our factoring for valedictorian, salutatorian," she said. "We realized that this was actually very inequitable for a lot of our students."
 
Most high school use a weighted grade-point average and the Drury administration was requesting a policy change to reflect that. 
 
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