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SteepleCats Play Final Two Home Games Of 2018 Season This Week

By John WoodNorth Adams SteepleCats
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NORTH ADAMS, Mass —With the NECBL regular season ending on August 1st, the 2018 SteepleCats will make their final appearances at Joe Wolfe Field this week with home games on Friday and Saturday.

Starting on Friday, the SteepleCats will take on the Danbury Westerners at 6:30. Their second matchup of the season, the SteepleCats look to even the season series as the Westerners pulled off a 9-3 victory over North Adams on the opening night of the season. Yet since then both of the teams have had their struggles throughout the season, coming into the game with similar records.

Then on Saturday, North Adams will host a rare doubleheader against their long-time rival in the Keene SwampBats. With their second meeting at Joe Wolfe Field being rained out twice, the teams will square off in two seven-inning games on Saturday with the first game starting at 3:30. With the playoffs out of reach, the SteepleCats will look to play spoilers as the SwampBats are of the three teams separated by half of a game fighting for the final two playoff spots.

Following Saturday’s game, the NECBL All-Star Game will take place at Mackenzie Stadium in Holyoke, MA on August 29th. First baseman Jackson Coutts and center fielder Jeffery Brown have been chosen to play on the Northern Division roster, as they both have been key contributors to the SteepleCats offense and defense all season long. However, the final Northern Division spot has been left to the fans to vote for. The SteepleCats are calling upon the fans to help vote infielder Joe Porricelli into the All-Star Game, as his bat and glove have been a major part in the North Adams lineup. Head to www.Vote18.NECBL.com to cast your vote.


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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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