Letter: Breen Has Right Experience for North Adams Council

Letter to the Editor02:00PM / Wednesday, November 01, 2023Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

Well, I just voted, and I gave my first vote for City Council to Pete Breen. Why, you ask?

No other new candidate has the experience and devotion and has been as generous with their time. Over the past 40 years, Pete has served on many boards and commissions. He has worked for a variety of employers including MCLA, where Pete was a facilitator and instructor for technology and curriculum development and assistant registrar. Pete took that experience over into the town of Adams, where he implemented the town's entire computer system, serving as the town's technology administrator. Pete then went farther south, where he was a member of the adjunct faculty at BCC for four years.

Shifting gears into education, Pete taught computer science at Hoosac Valley for 12 years, while also serving in the district office and as the pupil transportation officer.

After retiring from compensated work, Pete set his sights on volunteering in North Adams serving on the License Board Commission and serving as the North Adams representative for the Northern Berkshire Vocational School District, and finally, Pete's current passion, serving on the Hoosic River Revival Board.

That's why I gave my first vote to Pete Breen. And I hope that you do too.

David Willette
North Adams, Mass.

Tags: election 2023,

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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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