From Other Sources: News for and About Amherst: This Week, Catching Up

In spite of our best efforts, it’s been challenging, trying to keep up with the steady stream of news that has continued unabated through the holiday crunch and our post-election shock.  This week, the Valley has emptied out for the December holidays and town government has enjoyed a brief hiatus.  So we’re going to use this opportunity to catch up on a few of the stories that we missed since the election.

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News from the Region
Fight for Northampton School Funding Continues by Mia Vittemberga (11/27/24). On Thursday, over 60 teachers, parents, students, and community members gathered outside Northampton City Hall in pouring rain to call for increased school funding.The basic demand of the group, who collectively call themselves Support Our Schools, has remained the same for nearly a year now, after Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s proposed cuts to the city’s school budget sparked outrage last winter. The nascent Support Our Schools movement saw some success at the time in demanding additional funds for the current school year, but the final budget still cut approximately 20 jobs. SOS says that more layoffs are expected next year unless the budget increases.But now that job cuts have already taken place, advocates say City Council has the opportunity to restore some of the lost jobs. The mayor and City Council are permitted to reallocate funds at any time with a two-thirds majority vote.“The city has chosen to continue to accumulate mountains of cash reserved for capital projects, while laying off teachers and student support,” community member Shelly Berkowitz said at the rally. (The Shoestring)

Amherst Sixth Grade Move to Middle School Pushed to 2026 by Scott Merzbach (12/24/24).  Sixth-graders at the town’s three elementary schools will relocate to a standalone Sixth Grade Academy in the fall of 2026, a move that will come at the same time as the opening of a new elementary school and a town-wide redistricting for primary-age children, according to school officials. Although it had been assumed by school officials since last spring that the Sixth Grade Academy, possibly to be housed in the Amherst Regional Middle School, would not be ready for next fall, Superintendent E. Xiomara Herman made that official on Dec. 17. “Sixth grade will not be moving this upcoming school year,” Herman told the Amherst School Committee. Such a move of sixth graders is necessary before or when the new 575-student, K-5 school opens at the site of Fort River School on South East Street. Once that building opens, the aging 1970s-era Fort River and Wildwood schools will close, while the third elementary school, Crocker Farm will remain as a K-5 school. (Amherst Bulletin)

Amherst Forum Explores Fears and Perspectives on Coming Immigration Crackdown by Samuel Gelinas (12/23/24). Even many in Donald Trump’s circle are unsure whether the president-elect intends to follow through on his often expansive, and some would say, hyperbolic rhetoric — the kind of exaggerated speech that heralded a “big, beautiful wall” that never came close to fruition. But immigration advocates from the state are taking the president-elect at his word and bracing for the worst as the countdown to Inauguration Day clocks in at less than a month away.“I think it’s gonna be bad, even worse than Trump I,” said Javier Luengo-Garrido, an organizing strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.Luengo-Garrido’s remarks came as a panelist at Jones Library in Amherst, alongside Razvan Sibii, professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Daily Hampshire Gazette columnist, and Ariana Keigan, associate director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, in an event sponsored by Amnesty International of Amherst.
(Greenfield Recorder)

“No! Here’s What We Stand for”: Western Mass. College Leader Urges Higher Ed to Stand up to Trump by Karen Brown (12/17/24). A western Massachusetts college president is urging higher education leaders to stand up to the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to punish and defund colleges that have diversity and inclusion programs. Mount Holyoke president Danielle Holley said many colleges are being advised, by lawyers and public relations consultants, to hide their DEI programs and LGBTQ outreach. But Holley said that would be a mistake. Why make it easy for Trump? “To basically comply with things that are not within our values simply because we feel a threat of investigation is something that we should not be doing as the higher education community,” she said. “Instead, we need to just say ‘No! Here’s what we stand for. We will continue to stand for this. And if you believe that you can legally challenge our mission or our values, that’s up to you to try to do,’” Holley said. (NEPM)

‘Robin Hood’ or ‘Legalized Theft’? Why it’s easy for Massachusetts Police to Seize Property by Dusty Christensen and Greta Jochem (12/15/24). Malinda Harris was startled when she walked up to her car on a Springfield street one March evening in 2015.“Soon as I put my hand on the door, I’m telling you about six, seven, eight police officers just came from every direction,” she said. “It was really, really scary.”Police told her to back away and hand over her keys, she said.“They just took the car, no warrants, no paperwork. I got nothing,” Harris said.It would be five years until prosecutors contacted her about getting the car back. Harris was never charged with a crime, but the Berkshire County Law Enforcement Task Force suspected that her son, Trevice Harris, was trafficking cocaine and heroin from Springfield to the Berkshires, according to a police report filed in Pittsfield District Court. Hours before police took her car, Trevice, who typically drove a motorcycle, had borrowed her car. That day, police searched his apartment. (NEPM)

Leverett Residents Rap Kittreedge Compound Plans, Urge Caution as Negotiations for 400 Homes Move Forward by Scott Merzbach (12/10/24). Leverett residents are asking town officials to be skeptical of plans for turning the sprawling, 60-acre estate of Yankee Candle founder Michael J. Kittredge II into a 400-home development reserved for people 55-and-over, even if a portion of the dwellings are set aside for low- and moderate-income individuals.“Definitely people in town would love to see affordable housing, and more housing in general,” said Nancy Grossman, vice chairwoman of the Leverett Finance Committee. “But the bigger issue is one of trust, and a perception that Kittredge has always been a negative influence on town.”For Carol Heim, whose Amherst Road home sits across from the compound that was developed by absorbing numerous residential properties beginning in the 1990s, there have been no market studies indicating a demand for such housing, and whether such a project is financially viable.“I haven’t seen anything establishing that kind of demand,” Heim said in an interview, adding that it’s unclear if the plans, as shown by Josh Wallack, the development manager working on behalf of Kittredge’s son, Mick Kittredge, are realistic. “He’s presenting this as a project for downsizing, but it’s not clear to me that this can happen.”Both Grossman and Heim were on hand for a listening session following a November special Town Meeting that packed the Leverett Elementary School gymnasium with more than 100 residents, as was the case at Wallack’s first presentation on the development in December 2023. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Amherst Commission Considers Hunting Prohibition on Conservation Lands by Scott Merzbach (12/08/24). Hunting on Amherst conservation lands would be prohibited under rules being considered by the town’s Conservation Commission, which, if adopted as written, would closely mirror land-use regulations related to hunting in the city of Northampton. But the commission last Wednesday voted to table the section on hunting in the revised rules and regulations, written by its Land Management Subcommittee, after commission member Andrey Guidera raised objections to removing hunting access on conservation land, much of which is in South Amherst, including the Lawrence Swamp area, Atkins Flats east of the brook and near the Holyoke Range. “I think it’s a travesty we’re thinking to close the public lands in Amherst to hunting,” Guidera said. “It’s really got me.” Guidera said conservation land currently open to hunting is used by many people and there is little time, outside of the two-week shotgun season in December, that people would be hunting on those properties.He also noted there have been no hunting accidents in town. “All these years and we haven’t had a single accident, and now you’re going to close it because you think there might be one,” Guidera said. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

News from Farther Afield

US Homelessness up 18% as Affordable Housing Remains out of Reach for Many People by Michael Casey (12/27/24). The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials said Friday.The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said federally required tallies taken across the country in January found that more than 770,000 people were counted as homeless — a number that misses some people and does not include those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own.That increase comes on top of a 12% increase in 2023, which HUD blamed on soaring rents and the end of pandemic assistance. The 2023 increase also was driven by people experiencing homelessness for the first time. The numbers overall represent 23 of every 10,000 people in the U.S., with Black people being overrepresented among the homeless population. (Associated Press)

100-plus Cities in US Have Banned Homeless Camping This Year.  But Will It Work?  by Jennifer Ludden (12/26/24).  In the six months since the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for cities to crack down on homelessness, more than a hundred places around the country have banned people from sleeping outside even if they have nowhere else to go. The spike reflects widespread frustration over record-high rates of homelessness, along with drug use and mental breakdowns in public spaces. But advocates for the unhoused warn that more fines and jail time will only make the problem worse. The new laws are in rural, urban and suburban towns and cities — both Republican-led and Democratic — and span every region, including in places not known for homelessness, like West Virginia, New Hampshire and Wyoming. Many of the bans are in California, home to about half of the nation’s quarter of a million people who live outside. “Letting them stay in place is cruel. We want to prompt them to come to a better place,” says Tom Patti, a San Joaquin County supervisor in California’s Central Valley.
(NPR)

It is Becoming Harder to Prostest the Gaza War on Campus and also to Teach About It by Michelle Chen (12/20/24). Cornell (where the author is a postdoctoral associate) is one of dozens of universities that have introduced new regulations on when and how protests can take place on campus, erecting bureaucratic barriers for planning and registering protests. Cornell’s enforcement of such rules has created a Kafkaesque review process, leading to extraordinary penalties for student activists, including indefinite suspensions and three-year bans from campus. But Cornell’s treatment of activism among employees — including teachers, researchers, clerical and custodial staff — is more complex. Graduate student-workers, faculty and staff report that they have faced surveillance, retaliation or job loss for protesting against the genocide in Gaza.  (Truthout)