North Adams Public Libary: Bringing Music Home

08:14AM / Wednesday, March 11, 2026Print Story | Email Story

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Visit The North Adams Public Library (NAPL) to join professional trumpet player, composer, educator, and North Adams native Richard Boulger for a conversation about the transformative power of music.

The talk will take place March 18, at 5:30 pm.

Boulger will discuss what a lifetime of creative practice teaches us about finding our own voice, stated a press release.

Joining him will be guitarist Rodney Jones, a long-time faculty member at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, & former musical director for Miss Lena Horne.

According to a press release:

Together they'll explore what it means to view your instrument as "an amplifier for what you are hearing, thinking, and feeling" — an approach that empowers musicians to create original music from their own life experiences. Whether you're a lifelong musician, thinking about starting later in life, or simply curious about the creative process, this presentation offers insights into finding your authentic voice through music.

The talk will take place in the 3rd floor community room. All are welcome.

The North Adams Public Library is located at 74 Church Street, North Adams, MA, 01247.

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Drury High Weighting Grades for Honor Society

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
05:24AM / Wednesday, March 11, 2026

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Drury High School's honor societies will take into account access to early college when calculating grades.

The School Committee last Tuesday approved new language in the student handbook that reflect the changes.

"We were talking about how honor roll and Pro Merito and Nu Sigma is calculated, and we realized that even though we have weighted GPAs for taking more difficult courses for our students, we didn't actually factor that into who was eligible for honor roll or the Honor Society," Principal Stephanie Kopala explained to the committee last week.

The school's always used unweighted averages in determining honor roll status and who is inducted into the Honor Society, which predates the National Honor Society. On the other hand, class rank has used weighted grades.

Since Drury has become an early college high school and Kopala said the majority of students are now taking college classes as high school students "and we're not factoring in the fact that they're taking these challenging courses."

"They might not necessarily be getting that 3.5 or that 4.0 average that they would have gotten if they had taken honors or AP classes, which is why we put the weighting in to our factoring for valedictorian, salutatorian," she said. "We realized that this was actually very inequitable for a lot of our students."

Most high school use a weighted grade-point average and the Drury administration was requesting a policy change to reflect that.

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