image description — Brent Lefebvre is promoted to lieutenant in 2017 by Fire Chief Stephen Meranti. Lefebvre has been named as the retired Meranti' successor.

North Adams Names New Fire Chief

01:22PM / Friday, March 19, 2021Print Story | Email Story

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The city has a new fire chief with the appointment of Lt. Brent Lefebvre.

Mayor Thomas Bernard made the announcement on Friday.

Lefebvre, a 12-year veteran of the force, will succeed Fire Chief Stephen Meranti who retired in January 2021 after more than 33 years of service. Meranti had continued in the role of chief until his replacement could be named.

"Brent Lefebvre is the right choice to serve as the next fire chief for the city of North Adams," Bernard said in a statement. "In speaking with him, the search committee and I found an experienced firefighter with strong community connections who is ready to assume the fire chief’s leadership and command responsibilities, and to follow the collaborative and distinguished example of Chief Meranti."

Lefebvre holds an associates' degree in fire science from Mount Wachusett Community College and earned a bachelor of science in fire science from Ana Maria College in 2020. He served as a firefighter, lieutenant, and captain with the Clarksburg Volunteer Fire Department from 2001-2009. He joined the North Adams Fire Department in 2009 and was promoted to lieutenant in 2017.

"I would like to thank Mayor Bernard for offering me this opportunity," Lefebvre said. "It's an honor to be chosen as the city's next fire chief and I look forward to serving the community with the same professionalism and dedication as Chief Meranti has for the last 17 years."

Chief Lefebvre will be officially sworn in on Monday, March 22, with a public ceremony to follow at a later date.

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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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