The state released the results of the 2025 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) at the end of September. The results showed that nearly all schools statewide were still struggling to reach the levels from before the COVID-19 pandemic.

At its Oct. 7 meeting, the Harvard Select Board voted unanimously to appoint Alice Miles and Nicholas Roose to the town’s Historical Commission, and Erin McBee to the Municipal Affordable Housing Trust.

Harvard received some good news this week in the form of a $1 million grant from the state’s Land and Water Conservation Fund Grant Program to help pay for the reconstruction of McCurdy Track. 

Town Meeting’s ambivalent voting on the purchase of a 6-acre parcel on Old Mill Road for a new athletic field flipped from just shy of passing in the spring to passing by a hair in the fall. But before the soccer balls can start flying across the town’s newly purchased plot, a lot of things need to happen.

Plans are in the works for a six-building commercial development on a 23-acre site at 320 Ayer Road.

Over the past month, the Harvard Police Department has sworn in two new officers, Dean Barbera and Hannah Shaw. Barbera comes with prior law enforcement experience, while Shaw graduated from the Boylston Police Academy last June.

Harvard’s town meetings last Saturday, Sept. 27, lasted barely two hours, including a half-hour intermission. Town Clerk Rose Miranda reported that 463 voters registered for the meeting and received electronic voting devices. It was a sizable turnout for a fall Town Meeting, but smaller than the 520 who attended the Annual Town Meeting in May.

At the Wednesday, Oct. 8, Special Town Election, voters will choose one of two candidates to fill a seat on the Select Board left vacant when Rich Maiore resigned last spring. The Press asked the candidates, Eric Ward and Adam Wool, to introduce themselves, tell us why they are running, and then answer three questions.

At the candidates forum Tuesday night, Eric Ward and Adam Wool, who are competing for an open seat on the Select Board, fielded questions that ran the gamut of local concerns.

Last week, residents received an email—with a postcard scheduled to follow—about a change to the company that supplies electric power to a majority of town residents, as well as to the schools and town buildings. 

The building that’s home to the General Store has new owners. They are Matt Marolda and Betsy Starr, longtime residents of Harvard. The sale was announced Monday afternoon, Sept. 22, by Steve Nigzus of Harborside Realty, who brokered the purchase with the building’s former owners, Adam and Lyn Horowitz, who currently reside in South Africa.

Before 1984, Harvard residents threw their trash, both household and construction, into pits located in multiple areas around what is now the Transfer Station. According to the state, the “old landfill” is the likely source of PFAS in private wells in the area.

As summer blended into fall, Harvard’s Select Board considered new appointments to several town committees and boards. Applicants brought with them diverse work-life experiences and a shared commitment to improving town life. 

At back-to-back town meetings Saturday, Sept. 27, at Bromfield School’s Cronin Auditorium, voters will be asked to consider three articles remaining from May’s Annual Town Meeting and five more articles at the Special Town Meeting that follows. Annual Town Meeting, Session 2, begins at noon and Special Town Meeting at 1 p.m.

What is 27 pages long and brimming with diagrams and design specs for village-like, clustered development? It’s the new commercial zoning bylaw proposed for Harvard’s commercial district, a 1.2-mile stretch of Ayer Road between the Route 2 interchange and Myrick Lane. Voters will have the chance to accept or reject the bylaw at the Sept. 27 Town Meeting.

For the third time in as many years, MassDevelopment, the state agency responsible for the commercial and residential development and municipal operations of Devens, has seemingly rejected a request that it rejoin the committee it helped create to explore options for future governance of the state-run Devens enterprise zone.

The project to repair and upgrade Ayer Road from the Route 2 interchange to the Ayer town line just got a little more expensive for the town. Construction, which will include sidewalks, bicycle lanes, and an improved drainage system, will be paid for with federal funds from the Transportation Improvement Program, but the town is on the hook for the cost of the design and all the necessary land takings and easements.

At Annual Town Meeting last May, a vote to purchase a 6-acre parcel on Old Mill Road from a private landowner, suitable for the potential development of a multipurpose athletic field, failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds vote by only three votes. The Select Board has reintroduced the article in the Special Town Meeting warrant.

The School Committee’s longtime goal has been to keep the Bromfield School building well maintained and usable as far into the future as possible. A vote on Article 5 at Town Meeting next week could put Harvard in line to receive state funds to pay nearly half the cost of a new, energy-efficient heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system for Bromfield.

The School Committee has said it hopes to have a contract with a new superintendent by mid-January 2026, so that the newcomer will have time to make a smooth transition with departing Superintendent Linda Dwight.