BCC contributes to Afghanistan school

12:00AM / Monday, November 15, 2004Print Story | Email Story

Berkshire Community College staff and students in October donated ten large boxes of school supplies to a village school in Afghanistan. Part of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, these supplies are in memory of north county resident Peter Goodrich, who was in the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. One of the college's student clubs, the Global Issues Resource Organization (GIRO), sponsored and publicized the project, at the request of one of its members, Margalis Riera-Filson, a 65-year-old student in the Physical Therapy Assistant program. She brought the idea to the BCC club because it was her son, Marine Corps Major Rush Filson (a BCC graduate), who discovered a village school of 300 where he is stationed in Afghanistan that had no money and no supplies. Rush Filson had been a childhood friend of Peter Goodrich, and was in regular touch with Peter's parents. When the Goodrich's learned of the school, it gave them the answer to how to best honor their son's memory. The memorial trust fund in their son's name has funded this project. When one faculty member tried to buy some supplies for the project at the college store, store manager James Bowman recalled the seven boxes of old paper and pencils that he'd been intending to clean out since he began working there twelve years ago. He donated all of them. The other three boxes contain miscellaneous materials donated by other BCC faculty, staff, and students.

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North Adams Officials to Revote School Committee Members

Staff reports06:31PM / Friday, October 09, 2026

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — City and school officials will meet a second time to vote in two new members of the School Committee.

The joint convention of the City Council and School Committee will be held on Tuesday at 6 p.m. in the City Hall conference room and via Zoom.

Damon Grimes and Paul Moriarty were jointly elected on Monday to fill two seats vacated by resignation. They were two of four candidates standing for election.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey, chair of the School Committee, said she had received in inquiry about the votes, which were done by secret ballot.

"I have been advised that voting by ballot was not permissible in this circumstance," she said, after consulting the School Committee's attorney Adam Dupere and city solicitor KP Law.

To ensure the validity of the votes and conduct of the election, the joint convention will reconvene and formally confirm the selection of Grimes and Moriarty.

"I apologize for the inconvenience of having to reconvene," the mayor said in a statement. "My intention in using a ballot was to address concerns raised following our previous convention, when some members expressed discomfort with publicly voting for or against individual candidates.

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