State grants green light to Berkshire Charter School

12:00AM / Thursday, October 16, 2003Print Story | Email Story

The state on Thursday gave the green light to the proposed Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter School

Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey today awarded five new charter schools with their charters that were approved by the Board of Education earlier this year, including the proposed Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter School in North Adams.

"Providing a top-notch education to all children in the Commonwealth is a top priority for the Romney/Healey Administration," Healey said. "Charter schools provide an excellent education option for students and we are very pleased with the success that they've shown."

Charter schools are public schools that are given the freedom to organize their activities around a core mission, curriculum, or teaching method and set their own budgets and staffs. They were created to increase student achievement, give parents more educational choices, develop best practices and be held accountable for results. A charter school must demonstrate positive results within five years or lose its charter.

The proposed Berkshire Charter School has generated heated debate and earned both public support and condemnation. North Adams Mayor John Barrett III has been perhaps the most vocal critic, even unsuccessfully suing the state to try to stop the school from moving forward. Supporters say the charter school would offer an innovative alternative for local parents and students. Critics say the school would drain funds from the public schools and would not serve the public well.

The five new charter schools are:

Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School is a regional school, which will serve several communities including Adams-Cheshire, Clarksburg, Florida, Hancock, Lanesborough, Mount Greylock, North Adams, Savoy and Williamstown. The mission of the school is to integrate the study of arts and technology with core subjects to promote master of academic skills and content. The school will open in 2004 for students in Grades 6 through 12.

Boston Preparatory Charter School will serve students from Dorchester and Mattapan in Grades 6 through 12. The school's mission focuses on high academic achievement, personal growth and ethics. The school is scheduled to open in 2004.

Excel Academy Charter School is a regional school, serving students from East Boston and Chelsea in Grades 6 through 8. The school will prepare students to be successful in high school and college by providing tutoring and academic enrichment based on students' individual strengths, needs and interests. The school opened September 2003 in East Boston. Excel Academy Charter School opened in September 2003.

Hill View Montessori Charter School of Haverhill will serve students in Grades 1 through 8. Students will be challenged with a curriculum that effectively aligns, merges and consolidates the Montessori curriculum, the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Hill View Montessori Learning Objectives to ensure that all students meet rigorous academic, personal and social achievement objectives. The school is scheduled to open in 2004.

Salem Academy Charter School will open in 2004 with a class of 88 sixth- and seventh-grade students and will add a grade every year through Grade 12. The school will provide a standards-based, college-preparatory curriculum to ensure that all students perform at or above grade level.

"Charter schools have played a key role in the success of education reform in our state and I am confident that these schools will be no different," said Education Commissioner David Driscoll. "Charter schools give our parents public school options and generate ideas and innovations that traditional public schools can use to ultimately benefit every student."

Healey also announced the renewal of charters for 11 existing charter schools. These were approved by the Board of Education during fiscal 2003.

Abby Kelley Foster Charter School Boston Evening Academy Charter School Champion Charter School Health Careers Academy Charter School Mystic Valley Regional Charter School New Leadership Charter School Rising Tide Charter School River Valley Charter School Sabis Foxboro Charter School South Boston Harbor Academy Charter School Sturgis Charter School.

The charter school movement in Massachusetts has grown rapidly since the first 15 charters were granted in 1994. Today there are 50 existing schools serving more than 19,000 students, with an additional 13,000 others on waiting lists. Once new charter schools open, Massachusetts will have a total of 55 charter schools. For more information on charter schools, look online at www.doe.mass.edu .

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Youth For The Future: Adwita Arunkumar

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
05:14PM / Saturday, April 18, 2026

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Williams Elementary School fourth-grader Adwita Arunkumar has been selected as our April Youth for the Future for her mentoring of a younger child.

Youth for the Future is a 12-month series that honors young individuals that have made an impact on their community. This year's sponsor is Patriot Car Wash. Nominate a youth here.

Adwita has cortical visual impairment; she has been working with her teacher, Lynn Shortis, and her, paraprofessional Nadine Henner.

"My journey with CVI means that I learned in a different way. I work hard every day with Miss Henner and Miss Lynn, to show how smart I am," she said.

"Adwita is a remarkable student. She's a remarkable child. She has, as she shared, cortical visual impairment, which is a brain-based visual processing disorder, which means the information coming in through the eyes is interfered with somewhere along the pathways, and we never quite know what's being interpreted and how and how it's being seen," said Shortis.

"So she has a lot of accommodations and specialized instruction to help her learn."

Recently Adwita has chosen to mentor 4-year-old Cayden Ziemba, who is also visually impaired.

"I decided to be a mentor to Cayden so that she can learn some new things. I teach her how to walk with the cane, with the diagonal and tap technique, I am teaching her Braille," she said. "I enjoy spending time with Cayden, playing games and being a good role model."

Shortis said the mentoring opportunity came up when Cayden was entering preschool at Williams, and they introduced her to Adwita.

"Adwita works really, really hard academically. She's very smart, but there are a lot of challenges in that, because of the way that it's so visual and she's a natural. She's just, it's automatic," Shortis said. "It's kind of like a switch is turned on and she becomes this extremely confident and proud person in this teacher role."

Adwita also has been helping Cayden on how to use her cane on the bus and became a mentor in a unexpected ways.

"Immediately at the start of this year, she would meet Cayden at the bus. She has taught Cayden how to use her cane to go down the bus stairs. Again, Adwita learned that skill, so it wasn't something I had to say to her, this is what you need to have Cayden do. She just automatically picked that up and transferred that information," said Shortis. "Cayden is now going down the bus step steps independently with her cane. And then she really works hard with Adwita in traveling through the hallways, Adwita leads her to her class every morning, helps her put her things away and get ready for her morning."

Adwita said she hopes Cayden can feel excited about school and that other students can feel good about themselves as well.

"I want them to know that Braille is cool to learn. You can feel the bumpiness with your fingers. I want people to know how you can still learn if your brain works differently sometimes. I need to have a lot of patience working with a 3-year-old. I need to be creative and energized," she said.

She hopes to one day take her mentoring skills to the head of the class as a teacher.

"I want to become a teacher and teach other students when I grow up. I might want to teach math, because I am great at it," she said. "I also want to teach others about CVI. CVI doesn't stop me from being able to do anything I want to. I want students to not feel stressed out and know that they can do anything they want by working hard and persevering."

Her one-to-one paraprofessional said she likes seeing the bond that has grown between the two girls, and can picture Adwita being a teacher one day.

"I do see her in the future being a teacher because of her patience, understanding and just natural-born instinctive skills on how to work with young children," Henner said.

Shortis also said their bond is quite special and their relationship has helped to bring out the confidence in each other.

"The beauty of it, there's just something about it their bond is, I don't even really have a word to describe the bond that the two of them have. I think they share something in common, that they're both visually impaired, and regardless of the fact that their visual impairment differs and the you know the cause of it differs," she said.

"They can relate. And they both have the cane. They're both learning some Braille. But there's something else that's there that just the two of them connected immediately, and you see it. You just you see it in their overall relationship."

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