News

The Drawbridge Mentality—Exclusion and Escapism in Acton Massachusetts
It’s a wintry Thursday in the last week of January, in a grand room on the second floor of Town Hall. Posters are spaced evenly around the brightly-lit room, featuring colorful charts paired with questions such as “What demographic trends surprised you?” or “Where should new housing be built?” Staffers direct each attendee to pick up a pen and a stack of sticky notes, creating an English class-like atmosphere. Tonight’s public forum seeks to inform the Housing Production (HPP). The visioning document will detail how Acton plans to meet its obligations under state law to ensure a supply of affordable housing. The town has advertised this forum for weeks, including a press release in the Boston Globe. Those efforts have brought out a crowd of sixty-five...
Teachers on Virtual Learning
As you just finish scraping the last bit of breakfast off your plate, you grudgingly open up your laptop to attend your first Zoom call of the day. After thirty minutes of class discussion, you click on the Google Classroom tab to receive an onslaught of new school assignments, fresh and waiting for your completion.
With the spread of COVID-19 and the closing of schools, teachers are taking on a puzzling issue: virtual learning. The quick decisions made by Governor Baker, Principal Dorey, and Superintendent Light left the future of school operations unforeseeable. Mrs. Bromberg, a math teacher at the Acton Boxborough Regional High School, mentions that the “fluidity of the virus” is a challenge and that it is “difficult to adjust.” She reports that the long hours spent grading became...
Acton Board of Selectmen 2020 Election
“What, in your opinion, sets you apart?”
We asked this question and many others to the four candidates vying for Acton’s Board of Selectmen on June 2nd. One thing we learned was that they have a lot in common...