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Date: 8/30/2022
AMHERST – The Amherst Regional Public School District (ARPS) resumed its first-day celebration on Aug. 24 at Kendrick Park.
Superintendent Michael Morris said the district has hosted the celebration for at least 10 years, typically taking place on the Amherst Town Common. The common was unavailable this year due to preparation for the Amherst Town Rotary Fair.
“It was a national group of teachers that said that celebrating the beginning of school is really important and one way to celebrate it with the community is to bring the community together and this event does that,” Morris said. “You can see lots of different people from lots of different schools. We scaled it back a little still because of the location, we used to have horse rides and we’ve had to scale things back a little bit for the first year back but hopefully next year we can have the Common again which is a little bit of an easier setting.”
Amherst Regional Middle School eighth-grader Andre Herrington had mixed feelings about the new school year.
“I feel excited and kind of anxious at the same time, because next year I will be in high school,” Herrington said. “Life is going to go by really quick and I don’t like that so much.”
Morris said the event used to have a more organized program, but he realized the program is really the fact that people are making connections which led to this year’s celebration being a more free-flowing meeting and interactions between parents and students of all ages.
Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service (CRESS) Director Earl Miller made an appearance, saying his team of eight responders are ready to begin responding to calls on Sept. 6. Miller said he saw the benefits of his workers to help students enrolled in the district as two-fold.
“We’re really talking about things like mediation and conflict resolution and the idea that it’s an opportunity to ingrain those things early in life so you’re not catching folks after they’ve been through so much trauma,” Miller said. “We’re lucky – we have a good school system, good leadership and so I also see this as an opportunity for my folks to get better by working with real talented professionals.”
The celebration also had tables set up for students to pick out a book, speak with firefighters and learn about the district’s efforts to support non-English-speaking families. Alisa Clements, facilitator of a group called the Multilingual Parent Advisory Council, said her group puts on events like a Latino heritage café and celebrations for linguistic diversity month with a mixture of performances, activities and education.
“Our group supports parents of children and students who speak languages other than English,” Clements said. “It functions as a mechanism for parents to understand more about school policies, given their first language isn’t English.”
New Mural
Morris posted a tweet of a mural called ‘Nuestros Caminos,’ installed at Fort River Elementary School on Aug. 23 and supported by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council. The mural was painted by a group of staff and approximately 60 students and local families over the past year.
“We have some staff members who are artists in their non-work with us life so they had a number of opportunities for students to come in, offer input and actually do some of the work of painting throughout last winter and spring. It’s this huge thing, we had it up at the Bangs Center and kids would come in on the weekends or after school and participate in that and then this summer our facilities department was finally able to do the install. We’re going to do a ceremony probably in a couple weeks to really celebrate it, but there’s only so many events you can do at once.”
According to Morris, artist Fitzcarmel LaMarre of New Bedford designed the mural digitally in collaboration with students at Fort River Elementary. Morris credited parent facilitators Abril Navarro and Karla Sarr for playing a key role in organizing and completing the project along with Dual Language Coordinator Katie Richardson and paraeducator Julianna Bowen “who conceived the grant.”
“We’re just really proud,” Morris said. “I think it really talks to what the school cares about, its values, and that students were really centrally involved in the creation is really important to us.”