Literacy Network of South Berkshire to Open Tutor Resource Center

04:23PM / Thursday, October 13, 2022Print Story | Email Story

Susan Weintraub, who passed away on Feb. 19, 2022, was a longtime LitNet tutor and supporter as well as a board member for eleven years.

LEE, Mass. The Literacy Network of South Berkshire (LitNet) announced the grand opening of the Susan Weintraub Tutor Resource Center at the LitNet headquarters on 32 Park St.

This new center will be a space for LitNet tutors and learners as well as the LitNet staff home base. A grand opening ceremony and gathering of Weintraub’s family, friends, and the LitNet staff and board will take place on Sunday, October 23 at 2 PM.

Susan Weintraub, who passed away on Feb. 19, 2022, was a longtime LitNet tutor and supporter as well as a board member for eleven years. Having received a master's degree from Columbia University in Speech Therapy, Weintraub brought educational expertise to the LitNet team. She was also a part of the LitNet development committee, participating in fundraisers. Her passions were tutoring immigrants in English and helping people in any sort of capacity.

The Tutor Resource Center in Weintraub's memory has been made possible by the Susan Weintraub Memorial Fund.

"It's been a very active time at LitNet, and it is a welcome relief to have a new home base in which to keep growing as an organization," said LitNet's Executive Director Leigh Doherty. "Sue's family and colleagues believe that our new Center is very much in the spirit of Sue's generosity and aligns with the vision she had for a literate and engaged Berkshire community."

This new space (located just below LitNet's current operational office) is a three-room suite: an entrance office; a meeting room that will serve as workspace for tutor-learner pairs to meet, for LitNet staff to enroll new tutors and learners, and that will house four computers with ready-to-use language-learning resources; and a third room that will house LitNet's library collections: The Susan Weintraub Professional collection, The Donald. C. McGraw Foundation literature collection, and The Ruth Krauss children's literature collection. During regular business hours, the Resource Center will maintain an open-door policy for any current or prospective LitNet tutor or learner. LitNet will continue to maintain its resource and tutor space in the Lee Library, which has served as its central location for 31 years, since the organization's founding in 1991.

Tags: literacy,

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Lee Wants Bioremediation in Housatonic River Vernal Pool Study

05:24AM / Thursday, September 03, 2026

LEE, Mass. — The town has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and General Electric to include PCB bioremediation in its vernal pool study on the Housatonic River.

Lee officials are urging the EPA to require GE to add a bioremediation treatment arm to the vernal-pool study or provide the public with a clear explanation for why such testing is being excluded.

"This is exactly the kind of question EPA and GE should be asking before final remedy decisions are locked in," Select Board Chair Bob Jones said in a statement released to the press. "The town is not asking to slow the cleanup. We are asking EPA and GE to make the cleanup smarter, less destructive, and more protective over the long term."

An open house was held in Pittsfield earlier this summer for the Vernal Pool Pilot Study on Reach 5A of the Housatonic River, a five-mile stretch between the river's confluence and Lenox border.

EPA has required GE to conduct a Vernal Pool Pilot Study as part of the Housatonic River Rest of River remediation, comparing excavation and restoration with activated-carbon-based treatments, including a product called SediMite and powdered activated carbon, the town said.

Ten vernal pools will be cleaned of polychlorinated biphenyls in total, five with excavation and five with active carbon, and seven additional vernal pools will be monitored as controls. Construction will be complete around October, but the pools will be left to their natural processes and monitored with surveys and sampling for three years.

The Lee PCB Advisory Committee wrote a letter calling for the 21st-century approach it said could reduce long-term toxicity, avoid unnecessary destruction of sensitive habitats, and improve the effectiveness of the cleanup.

It states that Lee supports the study's purpose and agrees that EPA and GE must understand how cleanup activities affect sensitive vernal-pool ecosystems.

"The current pilot includes 10 treatment pools and seven control pools, while local officials understand that roughly 100 vernal pools may occur in the broader remediation corridor," the Aug. 27 letter reads.

"That makes the pilot study consequential: the methods tested now could shape how many sensitive wetlands are excavated, reconstructed, treated, or left with PCBs managed in place."

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