Sheffield News

The Quinn Elementary School in Dartmouth and the Rochester Elementary School came up winners in the Recycle Bowl, a first-time nationwide recycling contest announced recently.

The Quinn Elementary School in Dartmouth and the Rochester Elementary School came up winners in the Recycle Bowl, a first-time nationwide recycling contest announced this week.

If the three outlying community schools in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District remain open, administrators say they will go back to voters to seek the needed funding to maintain them.

Berkshire-based film-industry titan Douglas Trumbull, 69, gets a special Academy Award this Saturday for his pioneering special-effects work in "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Blade Runner," among others.

The president of a prominent local business is engaged in a land dispute over the use of a private landing strip at his residence.

When all five member towns of the Southern Berkshire Regional School District did not sign off on a $3 million bond last May that would have funded $1.4 million in upgrades at three outlying schools, administrators were destined to face some difficult decisions.

Southern Berkshire Regional School District administrators on Monday said it is the $1.4 million in upgrades needed at the three outlying schools pushing discussions of their closing.

The Department of Public Health in Massachusetts is admirably aggressive in protecting the interests of residents, but its brief ban on the milk sales of Twin Rivers Farm in Sheffield appears to have been an instance in which that aggressiveness backfired.

State regulators have lifted a ban on milk sales at Twin Rivers Farm in Ashley Falls in Sheffield, according to the Berkshire Eagle, which noted that a local herd of cattle was not actually infected with a rare bacteria as previously suspected.

Historic road tours, new trail walks, land conservation and a new smartphone app are among the new projects in Berkshire County which will be supported by the more than $70,000 in grants from the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area.

A government investigation of the herd suspected of being the source of a single case of a rare bacterial disease has so far not located the germ at Twin Rivers Farm, although officials say the "thorough" search has not yet surveyed all cows and milk.

Parents and concerned citizens on Monday night implored representatives from the Southern Berkshire Regional School District to find ways to retain the three outlying schools, which are currently targeted for closure.

Sales at Twin Rivers Farm in Ashley Falls have been halted while state health officials investigate the possibility that its raw milk may be contaminated with a rare, infectious bacteria, the Berkshire Eagle reports.

Because of tight budgets, the schools are targeted by their districts, partly because of rapidly declining enrollments and, even more significantly, because the buildings seem like 19th-century relics in a 21st-century world.

Police say that Andrew C. Decker, Abram J. Boinay and Ann Woodger broke into the house about 1:30 p.m. Thursday while the homeowner, Robert Smith, was inside.