■Springfield, torn for a week by violence between black and white students in four high schools, remained uneasy today in the wake of School Committee rejection of several demands by a committee of black parents. A key demand, that the School Committee end school principals’ authority to impose automatic suspension of any student fighting on school property — a regulation the blacks said was used selectively against them — was rejected.
■The city’s recycling center will be in operation Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Board of Public Works yard on Locust Street. Sponsors of Saturday’s operation, the Hawley Junior High School Ecology Action Club, provide the volunteers to man the center and will receive the profits.
■City teachers awarded state Sen. Stanley C. Rosenberg, D-Amherst, their annual Friend of Education Award at their annual banquet Thursday afternoon at the Depot restaurant. Northampton Teachers Association President Jacques Laus cited Rosenberg’s “forceful and credible advocacy of public education and educators.”
■The Hampshire Regional YMCA has hired a new coordinator of teen programs run out of the Florence Community Center. Jeanne Burke of Northampton took the post, based at the Teen Center in Florence, on Aug. 28, and has begun recruiting new members and developing center policies.
■A new restaurant opens for business this evening at 95 Main St. in Easthampton. The restaurant, named Coco after owner Unmi Abkin and Roger Taylor’s 2-year-old daughter, is in the former location of Venus Restaurant.
■The Coca-Cola Bottling plant on Industrial Drive has recently completed a 13,000-square-foot expansion designed to unfurl chilled fruit beverage products lines, including Minute Maid and Gold Peak tea. The company has recently hired 100 new employees.