The homeschooling rate at Berne-Knox-Westerlo doubled during the pandemic and has yet to come down, leaving district officials to figure out how to attract students back into a formal school setting. 

BERNE — Peggy Filkins Warner says she learned to be independent from her grandfather.

“That’s where I got my attitude,” she said of her father and his father.

She was born in the Filkins farmhouse on Joslyn School Road in 1930, in an era when not a lot of women were involved in politics.

Maryellen Gillis, President Helderberg Family and Community Organization

Berne is the only one of the four Hilltowns whose tax rate was unchanged, with the others increasing between 1 and 2 percent, but not always for all residents.

As the town awaits the delivery of two dumpsters it needs to create an ad hoc transfer station while the old one gets torn down and replaced, service is expected to continue uninterrupted, Knox Supervisor Russ Pokorny told The Enterprise this week. 

WESTERLO – Steven L. Bose, a long-time funeral director and volunteer firefighter, died at his Westerlo home on Friday morning, Nov. 18, 2022, after a brief illness. He was 82.

Steven Lincoln Bose was born in the Bronx on Feb. 12, 1940, a son of the late Herman and Ella Slezak Bose.

Donna Gwin, President Friends of the Berne Library

HILLTOWNS — Penny Shaw Bartley has always loved to sing and entertain people.

It started when she was a kid growing up on a farm in Michigan. She and her siblings worked in the fields, “hoeing out weeds and driving the tractor and feeding the animals,” says Shaw in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Muriel Frasher was first appointed town justice in Rensselaerville in 2018 to fill a vacancy left by Dwight Cook, and, though she was unsure at the time whether she’d stay in that position, she was re-elected this November. 

At a town board meeting, Berne Supervisor Dennis Palow defended the state of the town’s finances, which was called into question by outstanding electric bills and a preliminary budget whose numbers didn’t add up.