Letter: Why Williamstown's Zoning Proposals Should be Tabled

Letter to the Editor03:15PM / Monday, June 13, 2022Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

I am writing in response to Peter Beck's letter of June 12, which argues that at town meeting, Williamstown residents should "discuss" the 10 articles the Planning Board has put forward and then vote them up or down.

Beck's suggestion makes sense only if you've never been to a town meeting. There simply isn't time for several hundred people to vote on the town budget and many other issues and then, after all that is done, discuss 10 separate zoning articles.

Had the Planning Board actually been interested in public discussion of its proposals, it would have held a series of meetings for this purpose months ago. Instead, it rushed the articles through with almost no opportunity for members of the public to offer input of any kind.

More discussion of the proposed articles is, in fact, a good idea. The proposals are quite complicated, and the Planning Board has done virtually no analysis of their potential impacts. But town meeting is not the right place for this discussion, which is why most – perhaps even all – of the articles ought to be tabled.

Elizabeth Kolbert
Williamstown, Mass.

Tags: zoning,

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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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