Tag: UMass Amherst

  • Hughes’s varied career includes YA fiction and music

    Mark Peter Hughes. (Courtesy photo)

    A proud Wayland resident and recently retired father of three, Mark Peter Hughes is proof that you can be creative and analytical at the same time.

    A former algebra teacher and healthcare analyst, as well as longtime guitarist in a local band, Hughes created “Lemonade Mouth,” a young adult novel turned Disney Channel hit.

    “Even today, all these years later, it comes up,” Hughes said about Lemonade Mouth. “It was a book that ended up having an impact.”

    Inspired by both “High School Musical” and “The Breakfast Club,” the film follows five high school students who meet in detention and form a music group to connect.

    Hughes’ youngest daughter, Zoe Hughes, 23, was a student at Happy Hollow Elementary School when the film premiered on the Disney Channel.

    “At the time, I was in fifth grade. I would show up in my fedora and strut down the halls because my dad was famous, and it was awesome,” Zoe Hughes said. “We got to go on set and meet the cast. For a little kid who loves Disney Channel, there’s nothing more special.”

    Zoe Hughes said her dad follows his passion and isn’t afraid to pivot.

    “He always prioritizes family, having fun, making an impact, and actually caring about what you do,” Zoe Hughes said. “I just really appreciate how nothing is mundane. In his view, everything has joy if you let it – that’s a way I want to live my life.”

    Growing up in Barrington, R.I., Hughes has loved music for as long as he can remember. He bought his first guitar on a whim in his junior year of high school.

    After graduating from the University of Rochester in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Hughes formed a band called Exhibit A with Andy McKenna, his roommate Tim Spooner, and friend Kevin McGurn, after seeing McKenna’s newspaper ad looking for people to play music with. In 1992, McKenna moved to Japan, and Hughes switched careers after getting his masters in Public Health from UMass Amherst.

    Hughes and his wife moved to Wayland in June 1997, needing a bigger space than their Brighton apartment to raise their first child, Evan. McKenna invited Hughes to play music with people McKenna “had just started jamming with,” and soon they started a band.

    “This group quickly evolved into what the Church Ladies now are, and we’ve been a band ever since,”Hughes said. “We’ve been connected with each other for going on 30 years — Andy, Tim, and I for closer to 40. It’s a group of fun, kind people I’m proud to be a part of.”

    Hughes said some of his favorite projects include songs “Freakalicious” and “Cotton Candy,” as well as a five-track zombie musical they’d put together during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “He has enormous creativity. So he’s always constantly thinking and tossing out new ideas,”said McKenna, who also plays guitar in The Church Ladies, said.

    Shortly after joining The Church Ladies, Hughes’ wanted to take a creative risk and decided to write young adult fiction. He started with “I Am the Wallpaper” in 2005, which was a finalist in the Delacorte Press Young Adult Novel Competition. The novel follows 13-year-old Floey Packer, who decides to reinvent herself while her popular older sister Lillian is away, but her plans are derailed when her diary is posted online.

    While he would later branch into young adult science fiction with “A Crack in the Sky” in 2010, Hughes is best known for “Lemonade Mouth,” a 2007 young adult novel that became a Disney Channel movie in 2011. Filming took place in Albuquerque, N.M., despite the book taking place in Rhode Island.

    “The book is also weirder than the movie,” Hughes added, though he clarified that the film was close in its adaptation.

    McKenna said he’ll never forget seeing the film for the first time at Wayland Middle School.

    “It was very emotional, seeing that come to life like that,” he said.

    Now in retirement, Hughes said he is looking forward to more house renovations, travel, reading, and potentially a return to teaching middle school.

    “I’m about as happy as I’ve ever been,” he said. “I’m at this really happy moment where I get to decide what I actually want to do next.”

  • Burst pipe in UMass Boston dorm leaves 600-plus students searching for refuge

    Kelly Broder

    Waterlogged belongings, makeshift beds, and unresolved frustration defined this past week for students on UMass Boston’s Columbia Point campus who say the administration has not done enough to support the more than 600 of them students who were displaced after a 10th-floor pipe burst in the East Residence Hall a week ago Monday (Feb. 9).

    “I feel like I’m begging, you know,” said freshman Yairamar Oropeza. “I’m begging for crumbs.” 

    Roughly 50 rooms were affected by water damage, but the now-broken fire suppression system is keeping students in all rooms from returning, university officials said. The burst forced residents — mostly freshman and transfer students — to evacuate and seek alternative housing.

    The university has offered all students in East Residence Hall housing on UMass Amherst’s Charles River campus in Newton, a roughly 30-minute drive from Columbia Point and a more than two-hour trip on public transit. 

    Some 130 students are now being housed at the Charles River campus, while others, said Karen Ferrer-Muñiz, the vice chancellor for student affairs,  are living in the DoubleTree hotel on Mount Vernon Street, which is about a 15-minute walk from the campus center.

    Many more students are staying with friends in UMass Boston’s West Residence Hall, have gone home, or have found housing elsewhere.

    For Oropeza, the past week has been exhausting. As a second-floor resident on the opposite side of East Residence Hall from where the flooding took place, she was offered housing at the Charles River campus, but, she said, students there did not have bedding, towels, or anything more than what they brought with them when they were evacuated.

    “We thought it’d only be like 10 minutes,” Oropeza said of the fire alarm evacuation.  

    Later in the evening, officials from UMass Boston purchased bedding from a nearby Target but not enough for all the students at the Newton campus. “Other people just slept using their backpacks as a pillow and their coats as a blanket,” she said. 

    Oropeza noted that she has stayed at three different places since the pipe burst — the Charles River campus, a friend’s West Residence Hall dorm, and with her boyfriend in Cambridge. 

    Students at the Charles River campus say laundry facilities are not easily accessible, and that staying there and keeping up with schoolwork is difficult. 

    UMass Boston shuttles are going between the two campuses starting at 6:45 a.m. and continuing every hour until the last one leaves the UMass Boston Campus Center at 10 p.m., the residence hall support page on the school site says. The school has also partnered with Uber to transport students cost-free to and from the University Station shopping mall in Westwood from the Newton campus. 

    Students from the Sustainable UMass Boston club started a clothing drive for students displaced by the East Residence Hall closure. The drive will be open 12-8 p.m daily until Friday, Feb. 20. Kelly Broder photo

    Students on campus have banded together to support their dorm-less peers by hosting a clothing and essential items drive. The evacuees, who were offered $1,000 from an emergency relief fund, according to Ferrer-Muñiz, were allowed back into their rooms on Wed., Feb. 11, to retrieve essential items like clothing and medication. They were then asked to move out the remainder of their belongings on Friday, when they came back to find tables full of free clothing, toiletries, and water bottles, and Saturday afternoon.

    In an email to students last Friday, the university said it would provide moving trucks to transport student belongings to nearby short-term storage units. 

    Eli Hochkeppel, a junior, said they offered their own clothes to their friends who were affected, “but once I got permission to have a larger space, I started asking other people for donations. It really blew up” they said. 

    Hochkeppel said they feel that support organizations like U-ACCESS and the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement have done more for students than the school administration. 

    Added Oropeza: “These students, they’re really the heart of UMass Boston, because they really, really have been supporting one another through all of this.”

    Students have been using YikYak, a social media app that allows users within a roughly 5-mile radius to post anonymous messages, share resources and discuss the residence hall situation. 

    The first floor dining commons reopened last Wednesday morning for regular meal hours, but the remaining residential floors will stay closed while flood remediation crews work to restore the damaged rooms. State inspectors are coming “in and out constantly” to assess things, said Ferrer-Muñiz.

    She noted that flood remediation crews are working through “different stages of restoration” and that there is no definitive timeline for when the building, or certain floors, might reopen. 

    Students should contact university officials if they need help, she said. “Instead of wondering, please come in and talk to one of us. We want to see them. We want to help them. We want to talk to them.” 

    This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism. 

  • Alumni golf tournament helps fund scholarships for 17 students in BHS class of 2025

    Maria Udalova, who graduated from Brookline High School this month, will attend George Washington University this fall with her first year fully paid — thanks in part to a scholarship awarded in the memory of a lifelong resident.

    Udalova, who helped found Brookline’s Students for Nuclear Disarmament club and lobbied at the U.N. as a junior, is one of 17 students from the Class of 2025 to receive scholarships from Brookline High’s Alumni Association.

    “It’s important to show young people that they are cared about and that people are invested in our futures,” said Udalova, who plans to study international affairs, “especially right now when there’s so much going on in the world.”

    About $10,000 of student scholarships were funded by alumni donations and the association’s annual charity golf tournament, held June 13.

    The alumni association was founded in 1990 to build a network of Brookline graduates, help organize class reunions and raise scholarship money for current students. It has hosted the annual golf tournament as its only fundraiser for 31 years.

    The scholarship Udalova received is named for Brenda Moran, a member of the Class of 1965 who lived in Brookline her entire life until her death in 2020. Moran was named to Brookline’s sports hall of fame in 2012 for her accomplishments in field hockey and softball, and she was named a Greater Boston League all-star in both sports.

    Her niece, Caroline Moran, travels from Texas each year to support the community and golf tournament, which was renamed in her aunt’s honor in 2020, even though Caroline has never lived in Brookline.

    Although she was awarded less than $2,000 — which may seem insignificant compared to college tuition — Udalova said the scholarship will have a huge impact on her family’s finances. The money is expected to cover the balance after her other scholarships are deducted, making her first year of college free.

    Sarah Smolyar, who also won one of this year’s scholarships, will attend UMass Amherst in the fall, where she anticipates double majoring in business and math.

    “It’s just gonna make everything a little bit less stressful,” Smolyar said, “especially since everything’s gonna be new and different, it’ll just take a little bit of that off.” Smolyar, whose mother, Olga, graduated from Brookline in 1990, is one of several recipients this year with an alumni parent.

    This year the tournament hosted 40 golfers — a drop from previous years that attracted around 100 participants.

    “We need more golfers,” said Paul Deletetsky, a member of the Class of ’69.

    Deletetsky grew up across the street from Robert T. Lynch Municipal Golf Course, where the tournament was held, and participated for his fourth year.

    New golfers, like Tara Sales, were also in attendance. A 2006 alumni, Sales played alongside her father and brother, who participate each year.

    The golf tournament and alumni association are both searching for fresh faces.

    “Unfortunately, what we’re finding is that we’re having a really hard time finding younger people that want to be involved,” said Marcy Kornreich, Class of ’74, the alumni association’s newsletter editor and former president. “I think that’s a challenge a lot of organizations are facing, especially nonprofits.”

    Kornreich acknowledged the tournament has become more demanding, with much of the planning falling on her and 83-year-old treasurer and president Stanley Goldberg. She said attending the scholarship ceremony for the first time reminded her why she got involved in the alumni association to begin with.

    “When we walk through the halls, they’ve done a lot of renovations on the school,” she said, “but it feels like the same place and the same sort of vibrant spirit and commitment to individual success, whatever that looks like.”

    Abigail Ketema, the only recipient to attend the golf tournament, will continue her education at Wentworth Institute of Technology, where she plans to major in architecture.

    “The amount of stress taken off my family — and definitely other families’ backs — is just, like, incredible,” Ketema said, “and I don’t know how else to say thank you.”