Letter: Vote DeMayo-Wall for Planning Board

Letter to the Editor06:40PM / Sunday, May 08, 2022Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

The only way that you can live in Williamstown and say "let's wait for the new town plan to solve our housing problem" with a straight face is if you're new to town or you have been asleep. We know that Williamstown will not follow housing recommendations in a master plan because we have a near-perfect record of not doing so.

Here's the evidence we do have: Williamstown's 2002 plan outlined seven strategies the town should use to create a target of 200 new housing units that people at or under the area median income could afford. We then spent the next 20 years ignoring all but one of the recommendations, and disparaging those who sought to bring them about. The MP recommendation that a portion of the Lowry property, in the town center, be used for housing was shot down. The MP recommendation that the Water/Spring Street area be used for housing was nixed when our own Select Board voted not to accept a proposal to build affordable housing on Water Street (Jane Patton was the only vote in favor). When the
Planning Board drafted bylaws to encourage housing density in the town center, another MP recommendation, it was accused of over-depending on the residents of Cole Avenue to accommodate housing; when it recommended bylaws to encourage housing out of the town center, it has been accused of supporting sprawl and runaway development.

In housing terms, we are worse off in 2022 than we were in 2002. With evidence that we systematically reject housing recommendations in the reigning Master Plan, how can anyone say with a straight face that opportunities to create new housing should wait for the completion of a new Master Plan? It's code for no, without the honesty, at least, of just saying no.

Vote for Carin DeMayo-Wall for Planning Board. She's smart, energetic, and knowledgeable. And not naive.

Cheryl Shanks
Williamstown, Mass.

Tags: election 2022,

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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