MCLA to Host Book Talk

04:06PM / Friday, October 25, 2024Print Story | Email Story

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) will host a lecture by Dr. Derron Wallace, a renowned sociologist of race, ethnicity, and education.

Wallace will present a book talk on his critically acclaimed work, "The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth," on Monday, Oct. 28, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Murdock Hall, Room 218. This event is part of the Commonwealth Honors Program and Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work (SASW) Speaker Series. It is free and open to the public.

Wallace is the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology and Associate Professor of Sociology and Education at Brandeis University. His book, "The Culture Trap" (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores the complex ways in which cultural stereotypes and expectations contribute to the educational inequalities faced by Black youth in both national and international contexts. The book has garnered significant recognition, including the prestigious 2024 Pierre Bourdieu Award for Best Book in Sociology of Education and the 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association for its contributions to anti-racist scholarship.

In addition to his authorship, Wallace is a distinguished scholar who has earned multiple accolades, including Distinguished Early Career Awards from the American Educational Research Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Comparative

and International Education Society. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar and a Gates Cambridge Scholar. His research, supported by grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Spencer Foundation, and other prestigious

institutions, reflects his deep commitment to issues of youth safety, immigrant rights, and public education.

With experience as both a community organizer and a researcher, Wallace's work has been featured by BBC News, the Guardian, NBC News, and more.

This event is also co-sponsored by MCLA courses including Institutional Equity and Belonging, Core Domains: First Year Seminar, Human Hertiage and Language Arts, Self & Society, and Capstone.

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North Adams School Project Awards $51M Bid

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
05:10AM / Friday, February 13, 2026

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The School Building Committee has awarded the Greylock School project to Fontaine Bros. Inc. of Springfield.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey said she could "breathe a little better" with a bid contract that comes in nearly $2 million under budget.

The committee approved a bid of $50,498,544 on Thursday night that includes two alternates — the rebuild of the Appalachian Trail kiosk and the relocation and reconstruction of the baseball field.

"I will say, all in all, for us to have overall the number of bidders that we had interested in our project, and especially to receive the GC bids that we did, the team Colliers and TSKP certainly did a good job attracting people to us," she said. "But this project ... really shows the testament of the good work that Colliers and TSKP and all of you have been doing throughout this process."

Fontaine had the low bid between Brait Builders of Marshfield and J&J Contractors Inc. of North Billerica.

The project had been bid out at $52,250,000 with three alternates: moving the ballfield, the kiosk and vertical geothermal wells.

Committee members asked Timothy Alix of Collier's International, the owner's project manager, about his impressions of the bidders. He was most familiar with Fontaine, having worked with the company on a half-dozen school projects and noted it was the contractor on the Mountain View Elementary School in Easthampton that the Massachusetts School Building Authority has held up as an example school. He also had some of his colleagues call on projects that he had not personally worked on.

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