Enrollment in schools didn’t increase by much

With this year’s influx of new full-time residents in the Northwest Corner, it was anticipated that enrollment at the region’s public schools would increase significantly.

The addition of new students would have been a boon; enrollment has been steadily declining in recent years, prompting many of the schools to begin advertising and marketing campaigns.

Over the summer, school principals said that they had received many queries about enrolling their children. But when the total number of students was officially tallied, the increases were not significant — and the enrollment decreased at the shared regional high school, Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

The official date for the student tally is Oct. 1. The number of students on that date is used for preparing the next year’s education spending plan. Six towns are in the Region One School District: Canaan/Falls Village, Cornwall, Kent, North Canaan, Salisbury and Sharon. Each town has its own elementary school; they all share the regional high school. 

The only schools that showed a significant increase this autumn were Cornwall Consolidated School, which had 93 students on Oct. 1 compared with 78 last year; and Salisbury Central School, which had 305 students compared to 276 last autumn.

At the high school, the student body decreased to 305 this year from 342 last year. 

Latest News

Angela Derrico Carabine

SHARON — Angela Derrick Carabine, 74, died May 16, 2025, at Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the wife of Michael Carabine and mother of Caitlin Carabine McLean.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated on June 6 at 11:00 a.m. at Saint Katri (St Bernards Church) Church. Burial will follow at St. Bernards Cemetery. A complete obituary can be found on the website of the Kenny Funeral home kennyfuneralhomes.com.

Revisiting ‘The Killing Fields’ with Sam Waterston

Sam Waterston

Jennifer Almquist

On June 7 at 3 p.m., the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington will host a benefit screening of “The Killing Fields,” Roland Joffé’s 1984 drama about the Khmer Rouge and the two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, whose story carried the weight of a nation’s tragedy.

The film, which earned three Academy Awards and seven nominations — including one for Best Actor for Sam Waterston — will be followed by a rare conversation between Waterston and his longtime collaborator and acclaimed television and theater director Matthew Penn.

Keep ReadingShow less
The art of place: maps by Scott Reinhard

Scott Reinhard, graphic designer, cartographer, former Graphics Editor at the New York Times, took time out from setting up his show “Here, Here, Here, Here- Maps as Art” to explain his process of working.Here he explains one of the “Heres”, the Hunt Library’s location on earth (the orange dot below his hand).

obin Roraback

Map lovers know that as well as providing the vital functions of location and guidance, maps can also be works of art.With an exhibition titled “Here, Here, Here, Here — Maps as Art,” Scott Reinhard, graphic designer and cartographer, shows this to be true. The exhibition opens on June 7 at the David M. Hunt Library at 63 Main St., Falls Village, and will be the first solo exhibition for Reinhard.

Reinhard explained how he came to be a mapmaker. “Mapping as a part of my career was somewhat unexpected.I took an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS), the technological side of mapmaking, when I was in graduate school for graphic design at North Carolina State.GIS opened up a whole new world, new tools, and data as a medium to play with.”

Keep ReadingShow less