■Mrs. Catherine Rogers, retiring instructor at Northampton Junior College, was honored at the alumni dinner dance Saturday at the highpoint Motor Inn, Chicopee. She received a standing ovation “in recognition of her 50 years of dedicated teaching at NJC.”
■The first meeting of all those interested in the 150-unit townhouse apartments proposed by the Pioneer Home Sponsors, for Baker’s Hill in Bay State was held in the basement of St. John’s Church in Northampton last night. Most of the 150 people in attendance showed interest in the project but some were opposed.
■Out-of-district students will not be accepted in Northampton next year now that the School Committee has gone along with the superintendent’s recommendation and voted against school “choice.” School Superintendent Bruce E. Willard said he has wrestled hard with the issue of school choice, weighing his objections over creating competition between public school systems against bringing in money from outside students enrolling here.
■The David B. Musante Jr. Beach in Leeds will open for the season Saturday, free of giardia lamblia, the parasite found in the water last summer and blamed for causing gastrointestinal disorders. The beach was closed last Aug. 18 due to an outbreak of giardia, sometimes referred to as “beaver fever.”
■The virtual school that Hadley Superintendent Nicholas Young planned to open this fall will be put on hold amid state concerns about quality control and duplication of effort. Young envisioned that students in Grades 6 through 12 from all over the state who can’t attend a typical public school would log onto their home computers and take courses form a virtual school in Hadley.
■U.S. astronaut Cady Coleman spoke on a satellite phone Tuesday to her family in Shelburne Falls, shortly after the landing with Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and European Space Agency Astronaut Paolo Nespoli in the Soyuz TMA-20, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. A Russian Soyuz capsule delivered the international trio of astronauts back to Earth on Tuesday after six months on the International Space Station.