Letter: Zoning Proposals in Williamstown 'Not Ready for Prim Time'

Letter to the Editor04:00PM / Monday, June 13, 2022Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

A recent letter urged Williamstown residents to vote on all 10 proposed zoning articles – some with many subsections –at the Tuesday, June 14, town meeting at the high school gym.

Is debating such a long list of complicated, highly technical articles at a town meeting really the best way to do zoning?
Is debating these articles now, with a new, complicated, confusing set of voting rules and percentages advisable – especially when town counsel issued one set of answers on the number of votes required to pass the former Planning Board’s recommendations and then later had to issue a revised set?

Wow. I don't think so.

Has the board done anything over the last year, during COVID-19, to truly inform our residents about these articles? Did it conduct surveys or community engagement meetings? No.

Do our residents truly understand how one article inter-relates to another? No, because it has never been explained, and I sure cannot figure it out. How do the drastic reductions in lot size, lot frontage, and side-, front- and rear dimensional requirements affect houses to be built next to you or in your neighborhood?

Are residents aware that none of these changes were seriously studied or researched?

Are residents aware of any community having four family houses allowed as of right, without community hearings to give residents a voice? I surely do not.

Are residents aware that there is no provision to provide for affordability and therefore no additional diversity in these articles?

What harm is there to have one more year of review and community outreach so we are all so much better informed and the Planning Board has time to research each proposal and to see how other towns have fared with similar zoning changes?

To be frank, most of these articles are simply not ready for prime time.

Sherwood Guernsey
Williamstown, Mass.

Tags: zoning,

iBerkshires.com Text Ads

rk MILES Blding Materials

Are You Ready to Update Your Home? Start With rk MILES. 4 Locations (800)670-7433

www.rkmiles.com

Greylock Youth SummerFest

Come join in on the wealth building fun! August 3-8. Click for event details. Insured by NCUA.

www.greylock.org

If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

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."

View Full Story