Clark Art Institute First Sunday Free

08:00AM / Wednesday, February 25, 2026Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute continues its First Sunday Free series on Sunday, March 1.

To celebrate Aboubaker Fofana's sculpture, "Bana Yiriw ni Shi Folow" (Trees and Seeds of Life), part of the outdoor sculpture exhibition Ground/work 2025, the March First Sunday Free theme is "Sprouting Seeds."

Enjoy free museum admission from 10 am–5 pm and take part in free special activities from 1–4 pm.

The Clark will offer an activity card to take a closer look at the artist's artful trees of indigo-dyed cotton. At 2 pm, join a Clark educator for an all-ages tour of Fofana's sculpture that embraces art, nature, and mindfulness techniques. From 1–4 pm, drop in to decorate a flowerpot or create swirling, sprouting sculptures that you can add to a large-scale map of the Clark's campus as part of a collaborative mini-Ground/work. Enjoy a tea tasting from Wild Soul River inspired by Fofana's connection to the medicinal—and spiritual—nature of plants.

A special "Tree Portraits" print room pop-up, featuring prints, drawings, and photographs that spotlight trees, will be on view in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper from 1–3 pm.

Admission and activities are free. For accessibility questions, call 413 458 0524. For more information, visit events.clarkart.edu.

Family programs are supported by Allen & Company.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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