Search Results

Keyword search: Amherst MA

By TED WATT and HELEN ANN SEPHTON

This column honors Colleen Kelley, the education director at the Hitchcock Center, who will soon be leaving her post after 40 years.In the fall of 1984, Colleen walked into the Hitchcock Center — young, bright, idealistic, and fresh off a position as...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

Editor’s note: This story will be updated.AMHERST — More than 130 people were arrested on the University of Massachusetts campus Tuesday night after those who set up a pro-Palestinian encampment on the South Lawn of the Student Union refused to...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — Carefully holding and balancing his violin, 12-year-old Heedo Noh, a Fort River School sixth grader, gets a suggestion for positioning the bow so it runs straight across the strings as he practices G.F. Handel’s “Chorus from Judas...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — A $97.3 million town budget for fiscal year 2025, maintaining municipal staffing and programs and promoting climate change and racial equity objectives, is being proposed by Town Manager Paul Bockelman, even as concerns are being raised that...

Staff Report

AMHERST — Police broke up a large party at a North Amherst apartment complex, with a few hundred college-age people in attendance, as part of a handful of alcohol-fueled incidents late Friday night into Saturday morning.Officers responded at 10:33...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — Widening the existing track from six to eight lanes and rejuvenating the interior grass field appears to be the extent of renovations that can be done to Amherst Regional High School’s track and field because of limited funding.While the...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — An avid reader throughout her life, who often brought her three children to the North Amherst Library as they were growing up, Hilda Greenbaum saw the need to improve the 1893 building to ensure it would continue to serve future generations,...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — An ongoing feasibility study is examining how the area around the War Memorial Pool, a 2-acre site in downtown Amherst close to Amherst Regional High School, can be revitalized into a popular destination for families.While the pool was...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — A foundational skills reading program, known as Magnetic Foundations, is being piloted by eight teachers in the four Amherst and Pelham elementary schools as the focus of an elementary literacy curriculum review this school year.Mary Kiely,...

By STEVE PFARRER

The Holyoke Civic Symphony has titled its 2023-2024 season “The Brass Menagerie,” not to be cute but to highlight a series of concerts dedicated to celebrating the family of brass instruments: the horn, the tuba, the trumpet, and the trombone.On May...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — Responsible for $135,000 in student debt, Amherst resident Ian Rhodewalt observes that during the yearslong federal pause in making loan repayments during the pandemic, he and his family were able to get a vehicle, to replace a broken-down...

By STEVE PFARRER

Call it an encore performance.“The Spiderwick Chronicles,” the bestselling series of fantasy books by Amherst writers Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, has just been turned into a streaming series on The Roku Channel.That comes 16 years after a feature...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

About a mile from where I live, there is a convenience store and a doughnut shop. For a period of a few years, a woman of perhaps 60 years of age could be found standing outside one of these establishments on most days. She would be shuffling her...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — A new retail store carrying assorted Amherst College merchandise, as well as school supplies, tech accessories and snacks, is open at 45 South Pleasant St., as demolition of a building immediately to the south, and removal of an attached ell...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — Construction of a three-unit, 10-bedroom home behind an existing home at 98 Fearing St., in the North Prospect-Lincoln-Sunset Local Historic District is inappropriate for the neighborhood, according to a panel that reviews projects and...

Staff Writer

AMHERST — An author who has twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, earning that recognition and a National Book Award for 2016’s “The Underground Railroad,” will deliver the main address at the 154th undergraduate commencement at the...

The Jones Library in Amherst received only one contractor’s bid for its long-planned renovation and expansion. When supplemental costs are added, that brings the estimated total project cost to at least $54 million. What seemed expensive before is now...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — In September 2022, the Town Council committed to keeping the $46.1 million project to modernize and expand the Jones Library going, at least until it reached the construction bid stage.For Amherst resident Toni Cunningham, that decision...

AMHERST — A near-unanimous Town Council this week confirmed Police Capt. Gabriel Ting as Amherst’s next police chief.Six days after Town Manager Paul Bockelman said he would name Ting, a 27-year veteran and interim police chief since last May, to the...

By SCOTT MERZBACH

AMHERST — Ericilda Xiomara Herman, a superintendent of a school district in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, will be the next superintendent for the Amherst, Pelham and Amherst-Pelham Regional schools, pending successful contract negotiations.Citing...

By ALEXA LEWIS

AMHERST — Student protesters at the University of Massachusetts began pitching tents near the W.E.B. DuBois Library Monday morning in solidarity with Palestinians, following the example of many of their peers at campuses across the country who have...