Letter: Bond for Mayor

Letter to the Editor07:20PM / Tuesday, October 12, 2021Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

I support Lynette Bond as North Adams' next mayor. I trust her experience and personal sensibilities, and believe her leadership would provide a breath of new life to the city.

Lynette Bond has been criticized as not being "from North Adams." This criteria sometimes is seen as between those lifers who "know what North Adams needs" versus those new arrivals having new ideas, new blood, and a vision to make change. I believe Lynette Bond will bring people who have lived here since birth AND those who arrive with the energy, excitement to participate in helping make this small city shine.

Lynette served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras in the business development sector. Her service is a show of the commitment she will bring to our city. I also served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and understand how that two-year submersion into another culture makes one a stronger, more resilient, and an understanding person.

I strongly endorse Lynette Bond for mayor of North Adams. She brings the needed skills, passion and a deep connection to our city.

Michael Bedford
North Adams, Mass.

Tags: election 2021, letters to the editor,

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Drury High Weighting Grades for Honor Society

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
05:24AM / Wednesday, March 11, 2026

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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