PITTSFIELD, Mass. - Williams Elementary School in Pittsfield has been awarded the National Blue Ribbon Award.

This award is given out to honor and recognize schools across the country for high academic achievement and succeeding in closing achievement gaps.

Those working with students everyday are proud to be honored.

“Absolutely amazing...the staff have worked really, really hard. I think this is a long time coming for them, so to finally receive the recognition and the honor for their hard work that they’ve been putting in is truly a great feeling and well deserved,” Principal Kerry Light said.

“We were so proud of all the hard work that we put in to writing the application, but also just the hard work as a whole school team to earn it. It feels wonderful to work with this community and everybody within it,” said Williams Elementary’s reading specialist Samantha Farella.

The school tested in the top 15 percent in English language arts and math for their MCAS scores in the state.

Faculty at the school says early preparation for the test is priority. 

“Even though I know third, fourth, and fifth take the MCAS, we’ve taken it as a whole school approach, like what areas do we need to work on and we start all the way at pre-K, all the way up to see how we can build all of that in so that way they get more exposure before they need it,” said pre-k teacher Nicole Virgilio.

But faculty at the school knows the award is not just about the test scores.

“It’s not just about the academics and not just about the test scores, so again that’s why we incorporated a lot of the S.E.L., the social emotional learning work, that we do and really fostering a staff and student sense of belonging,” said second grade teacher Justin Kie-Burdick.

A group of representatives for the school will go to Washington DC for a recognition ceremony.

Former Williams Elementary principal Nicole Shepardson will be joining the trip and says she knew the school was blue ribbon qualified when she first started there.

“I’m so proud of the work that they’ve done. When I started with them, we had talked about, ‘we can be a blue ribbon school, we have all the resources that we need, we have a highly skilled staff, there’s high expertise teaching,’ and I’m so excited that they reached that goal,” Shepardson, now the principal at Morningside Community School, said.

Williams Elementary is the first school in the Pittsfield Public School system to receive the award. The award ceremony will take place in November where the school will receive a plaque and flag.