COVID-19 Closes Two Grades at North Adams Elementary School

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NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Cases of COVID-19 among staff at Colegrove Park Elementary School is causing the closure of one grade for the week and remote learning for another. 
 
Kindergarten classes are closed this week with a reopening date of Tuesday, Jan. 18, and third grade will be remote also until next Tuesday. 
 
Parents and staff were notified of the closures on Monday afternoon. Superintendent Barbara Malkas in an update posted on the school district website reported that there were 31 positive cases reported in the schools. 
 
Colegrove had the most at 11, Brayton and Drury High had seven each, and Greylock reported six. 
 
"Every individual with a potential exposure has been contacted and given instructions on the course of action they need to take according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education guidelines regarding quarantine, including self-isolating and testing," Malkas wrote. 
 
The school system has been participating in the state's "test and stay" program that allows those who have been in close contact with an infected individual but aren't showing symptoms to be rapid tested for seven consectuvie days. As long as the student remain asymptomatic and has negative results, they can stay in school. 
 
Only about half the city's children in the 5 to 11 age group are vaccinated.
 

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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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