John Osborn

The four courts at Bromfield School were still damp from a day of rain when girls tennis coach Chris Holmes arrived Monday afternoon to sweep away twigs and pollen and prepare for the team's upcoming round of 16 match against No. 12 seed Rising Tide Charter School of Plymouth.

The Harvard Select Board voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve a $1 million investment by the town's Municipal Affordable Housing Trust to subsidize 12 affordable apartments in a 46-unit rental complex being built at Emerson Green in Devens. A decade in the making, the deal will nearly halve Harvard's affordable housing gap, earn two years of protection from unwanted development under state law, and add much-needed affordable housing to the region.

The No. 5 seed Bromfield varsity girls won their away match against No. 4 Amesbury 3-2 Thursday afternoon and are now headed to the semifinals of this year's Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association Girls Tennis Division 4 Tournament.

Eighty-two members of the Bromfield School Class of 2026 received their diplomas Friday afternoon, June 5, in an annual ritual held rain-free on the school's athletic field. The evening was near-perfect for the school's 146th commencement, with temperatures hovering in the upper 80s and a lazy-hazy but cloudless sky overhead.

Harvard's graduating class of 2026 was born in 2007 or 2008—almost exactly the years when the town's school-age population reached its highest recorded point of 1,376 children. Since then,the total number of school-age children living in Harvard—counting public, private, charter, and home-schooled students—has fallen by nearly 30 percent, to 966 in 2025. Every other town in this group has also declined from its own peak, though the timing and scale vary considerably.

At its annual goal-setting retreat, held June 9 on the porch of Hildreth House, the Harvard Select Board elected SusanMary Redinger to chair the town's executive committee for the coming year. The vote was unanimous. Ahmet Corapcioglu was elected vice chair and Eve Wittenberg clerk.

Harvard's Select Board voted unanimously Tuesday to oppose a provision in the governor's economic development bill that would strip the towns of Harvard, Ayer and Shirley of their say in how Devens is governed.

Dawn Dunbar had been Harvard's assistant town administrator for six months when, following the resignation of Town Administrator Dan Nason in February, the Select Board asked her to step in as interim. On Tuesday, the board voted 5-0 to make the appointment permanent. She is the first woman to serve as Harvard's town administrator.

Dawn Dunbar's new office at Town Hall is easily twice the size of the one she occupied as Harvard's assistant town administrator. She is still settling in. On her desk sits a candy dish. On a shelf nearby, four large blue three-ring binders—their pages flagged with colored Post-it notes—hold the town charter, bylaws, and policies she wants within reach. “I like paper,” she said. “I like being able to reach for what I need.”

A provision in Gov. Maura Healey's economic development bill would remove Harvard, Ayer, and Shirley from any formal governing role over zoning changes at Devens, replacing their three-town approval process with a single meeting run by MassDevelopment. All three boards have responded. Two want it stopped. One wants answers.