■Robert Levitt, owner of the Stewart’s College Towne Shop, has been elected chairman of the Downtown Merchants Association division of the Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce. Levitt replaces Ralph Levy who has headed the division this past year.
■Increased food costs and the end of a federal milk subsidy will force the price of full school lunches up a nickel in a number of area schools. When school opens next week, school lunches will cost 35 cents in Northampton and Hadley, up from 30 cents.
■Underage drinkers who try to buy alcohol in Northampton and some surrounding towns may find themselves waited on by undercover police officers posing as store workers, in a pilot program being launched in Hampshire County any day now. Officials won’t say exactly when the program is starting, or which stores are participating.
■The leader of the local venture to develop the former Northampton State Hospital says he has been invited to a ceremony Monday at which the developer will be announced. Gerald Joseph, director of the Springfield office of The Community Builders, said the invitation and a conversation with a member of the local review committee charged with recommending a developer leave him confident that his proposal has been selected.
■Each year when Three County Fair directors are planning the four-day event, they try to come up with a new attraction that hasn’t been seen before, said General Manager Bruce Shallcross. This year’s new attraction is actually a very old sport: jousting.
■The executive director and a trustee of the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School aim to open a second school near Boston, even as the Hadley school expands into the secondary grades. Richard E. Alcorn, the school’s director, and trustee Rosalie Porter, a language educator, submitted a prospectus to the state proposing a kindergarten through 12th-grade Chinese Immersion Charter school to serve Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Waltham, Watertown and Weston.