Serving the Amherst Regional High School community since 1914.
After six years as principal of Amherst Regional High School, Talib Sadiq has decided to step down. His departure marks the end of a tenure shaped by steady leadership, adaptability, and a consistent focus...
Students at ARHS walked out of classes early on January 30 to join a demonstration on the Town Common led by Amherst College students as part of a nationwide day of protest against U.S...
Ask any high school dean or principal what problem plagues them more than any other, and they’ll likely say vaping. This seems to be true at ARHS, with the school administration consistently taking measures...
On February 21, 2026, National Public Radio ran a story analyzing a substance abuse study including nearly half a million teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente health system in Northern California, which found that “teens...
On October 30, the University of Massachusetts Amherst held a dedication ceremony renaming the school’s engineering program to The Daniel J. Riccio Jr. College of Engineering. The renaming follows Riccio’s very large donation of...
This is not the first time the Amherst schools have undergone voluntary lead testing, or results have raised public concern. In the fall of 2016, then brand-new superintendent Michael Morris signed up the schools...
Superintendent Xiomara Herman sent a letter to families and staff in November 2025 sharing the results of voluntary lead testing that took place at ARHS, ARMS, Pelham Elementary, and Crocker Farm in September. These...
On Tuesday, December 9, LGBTQ activists and allies showed up in full force to show their support for queer students and others affected by the return of middle school counselor Delinda Dykes to her...
The ARHS elevator, which is 28 years old, has required major repairs for nearly a decade. This is typical, given that elevators have a life expectancy of 20 years, before one must consider “modernization...
At 8:19 p.m. on Friday, November 7, 2025, the Amherst Fire Department responded to a call about a fire on a construction site of 47 Olympia Drive, which quickly spread to 57 Olympia Drive,...
Starting this spring, ARHS will offer a new quarter-long English class: Expository Writing: Writing About Music, taught by English teacher Matthew Despres, who has worked at ARHS since 2017. This senior writing course will...
ARPS teachers sought help from the teachers’ union this fall when they returned to work to a September 4 memo from the superintendent entitled “Welcome Back,” dictating that they could only take one paid...
To students, ARHS often seems to run like a well-oiled machine. Attendance is entered by the end of the day, and parents and guardians know if we didn’t make it to school or if...
At the start of the 2025-2026 school year, ARHS dance students expected to be greeted by a new teacher, knowing that dance teacher Remy Fernandez-O’Brien had left ARHS to move to Spain with their...
This year, ARHS students returned to school to a largely unwelcome change to their school day. In the wake of a parent complaint filed with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE),...
Late in September, students who parked in the ARHS lot returned to their cars to find flyers on their windshields. These flyers reminded students that they needed to pay $80 a year for a...
This July, the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill to create phone-free schools from ‘bell to bell’ that will be implemented in high schools in the Commonwealth at the start of the next school year. ...
When students returned to school this fall, something miraculous was happening–the long-awaited new track and field project was in full swing, with construction crews working long days to bring the plan to fruition by...
In November 2024, Massachusetts residents voted to abolish the MCAS as a graduation requirement and replace the standardized test with district-designed policies requiring students to demonstrate mastery of math, English, and science. At ARHS,...
On the sunny morning of Friday, September 19, 2025, a group of Amherst students and teachers walked to the Emily Dickinson Museum to attend a poetry workshop given by poet Terrance Hayes as part...
When Jonathan Rosen was a student at ARHS in 1999, he took a Journalism class with English Department Head Sara Barber-Just, who was finishing up her first year of what would be a decades-long...
Established in 1961, by President Kennedy, USAID, or the United States Agency for International Development, has been pivotal in responding to crises worldwide every year since. In addition to human-made and natural crises, USAID...
On November 1, 2024, from 6-8 p.m., a group of 12-14 people gathered at the Munson Library for the Remember Together event organized by Sarah Goff, the mother of ARHS student Anna Burns, who...
Cakes of all shapes and sizes and designs awe-inspiring, funny, and also disgusting lined tables in the cafeteria. Students and staff walked by oohing and aahing, trying to decide on how much to bid...
This November, voters in Massachusetts approved Question 2 on the ballot, which eliminated the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) as a high school graduation requirement. This shift marks a major change in the state’s...
In the fall of 2023, Eric Swanson, an ARHS (‘78) and UMass (‘82) alum and innovator reached out to the ARHS administration and proposed a whopping $25,000 donation to the ARHS engineering department, to...
This year, the 2025 Western Massachusetts Counselors Association’s (WMCA) School Counselor of the Year hails from ARHS, Kelly Larcheveque. Principal Talib Sadiq said he was impressed by her winning the award. In a letter...
The Emily Dickinson Museum brought a contemporary poet to ARHS on Friday, September 27, in conjunction with an annual festival in which poets from across the nation celebrate Emily Dickinson’s legacy. The museum has...
When Librarian Ella Stocker and Social Studies Department Head Simon Leutz, advisers to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Club (ASAP), heard about a group called Women of Vision that was traveling to New England to talk...
On September 17, students in AP History and Holocaust classes at ARHS attended a powerful event in the library where they heard from Rosette Sebasoni, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This event...
