February is National Pet Dental Health month so I thought a discussion of periodontal disease is appropriate. Pets tend to suffer less from dental disease, and more from periodontal disease.
Dental disease refers to pathology specifically related to the tooth like caries (superficial decay in the enamel), cavities (deeper decay in the enamel), and tooth fractures. Periodontal disease refers to pathology related to the structures around the tooth. These structures include the gingiva (gums), periodontal ligament (thousands of strands of microscopic strands of connective tissue that hold the tooth in the socket, or jaw), and the perialveolar bone (the bone of the jaw around the tooth).
Periodontal disease usually starts with a buildup of plaque. Plaque is a thin film of saliva, old food and bacteria that can accumulate on the surface of the tooth within 24 hours. If this plaque is not removed, it mineralizes and becomes tartar. Tartar allows a matrix where pathologic bacteria can hide. These bacteria cause chronic inflammation and this inflammation will lead to recession of the gums, breakdown of the periodontal ligament, and resorption of the perialveolar bone. This process is slow and painful because while single rooted teeth may just fall out without intervention, many teeth are multi rooted where one or two roots could be rotten and the third intact. That requires dental extractions at your veterinarian’s and I have yet to meet a pet owner that is happy to hear that.
The key to intervening in this pathology is preventing plaque. No plaque, no tartar. No tartar, no periodontal disease. How do we prevent plaque? Let’s go through the options:
Brushing — brushing is very effective, but also the most frustrating option in my opinion. Brushing needs to be done every day to be effective. If you have the time and your dog or cat is more patient than mine, go for it. Make sure you use pet safe toothpaste. Human toothpaste has too much sodium, fluoride, and is sweetened with saccharin.
Treats, toys, or diets — there are certain toys, treats, chewies, and even special diets to help to clean the teeth. These items will have an abrasive action similar to brushing, increase the production of saliva, and some are treated with special enzymes or compounds to help control the production of tartar. Make sure that if you look in the pet store you find the Veterinary Oral Health Council (VOHC) seal of approval on the packaging or ask your veterinarian which products they recommend.
Do be careful. Many of the treats and diets tend to be calorie dense and can cause an increase in weight if overused. Also, remember you don’t want anything that’s too hard and may cause damage to the enamel or a fractured tooth. There’s a saying, “If it’s something you wouldn’t want to get hit in the knee with, it’s too hard for your pet to chew on.”
I hope this information helps. Remember, “keep on smiling.”
Dr. Kearns practices veterinary medicine from his Port Jefferson office and is pictured with his son Matthew and his dog Jasmine.
The Smithtown Township Arts Council is pleased to announce Winners Showcase I, a fine art exhibition featuring five winning artists from 2020 exhibitions. The exhibit is currently on view at the Mills Pond Gallery in St. James through Feb. 6.
Smithtown artist Lucia Alberti enjoys painting landscapes in acrylics. Lucia finds it most comfortable to paint from her imagination, incorporating subjects she finds of interest. This allows Lucia to “create a story in her mind of another place and moment in time, while trying to capture a glimpse of it upon my canvas.” Lucia’s work has been exhibited widely in galleries across Long Island.
Huntington Station artist Shain Bard’s paintings evoke a sense of a moment captured in time that people can all subconsciously relate to. The way the light filters through the leaves of a small forest, the driver’s view of dappled sun shining through the trees on a Sunday drive, or of a snowy sunset on a suburban street.“Nature and art are within and without us, something close to what I would call ‘home’. It is those moments when we most fully connect to our surroundings, those held-breath moments that I am interested in.”
Northport artist Margaret Minardi’s mixed media paintings juxtapose realism and expressionism. Combining years of classical training with a pure gestural mark making, she is inspired by the Expressionists of the 1950’s collage.“I am constantly in search of new mediums and processes that can be synthesized into my works. “Important to me is serendipity. Mistakes keep me interested, intellectually challenged, and excited.” Within Margaret’s works, the viewer is constantly challenged to interpret and reinterpret what they see. There is a narrative beneath the surface of all her works. “Each brushstroke is a voice for my inner world.”
Valley Stream artist Mike Stanko, a lifelong Long Islander, has been showing his unique and whimsical art for over 20 years.From his home in Valley Stream to the world beyond, he finds endless inspiration in the iconic, the familiar as well as the mundane — sunflowers, beach scenes, maybe even a grilled cheese sandwich. His paintings are bold and eye-catching and like the artist, convey joy, a sense of humor and a love of life.
Kings Park artist Pamela Waldroup is a fine art photographer whose work is about “hyper-focusing on the subject to solidify my own experience and provoke a memory, real or imagined, to surface both for the viewer and me.” She will exhibit black & white photographs from her series City Perspectives — Inside and Out. The works in this project “voice my strong desire to capture interactions between human, environmental and industrial elements through a geometric approach found in the repetitive patterns and shapes.” As an art educator, Pamela taught photography (darkroom and digital) and fine arts for 33 years.
The Mills Pond Gallery is located at 660 Route 25A in St. James. Gallery hours are Wed. to Fri., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sat.; Sun. from noon to 4 p.m.; closed Mondays. Admission to the gallery is free. Masks are mandatory. For more information, call 631-862-6575 or visit www.millspondgallery.org.
From left, Research Assistant Onur Eskiocak, CSHL Fellow Semir Beyaz and graduate student Ilgin Ergin. Photo by Gina Motisi, 2019/CSHL.
By Daniel Dunaief
It’s a catch-22: some promising scientific projects can’t get national funding without enough data, but the projects can’t get data without funding.
That’s where private efforts like The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research come in, providing coveted funding for promising high-risk, high-reward ideas. Founded and funded by Pamplona Capital Management CEO Alex Knaster in 2017, the Foundation has provided over $117 million in grants for various cancer research efforts.
Tobias Janowitz
This year, The Mark Foundation, which was named after Knaster’s father Mark who died in 2014 after contracting kidney cancer, has provided inaugural multi-million dollar grants through the Endeavor Awards, which were granted to three institutions that bring scientists with different backgrounds together to address questions in cancer research.
In addition to teams from the University of California at San Francisco and a multi-lab effort from Columbia University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists Tobias Janowitz and Semir Beyaz received this award.
“We are absolutely delighted,” Janowitz wrote in an email. “It is a great honor and we are excited about the work.” He also indicated that the tandem has started the first set of experiments, which have produced “interesting results.”
The award provides $2.5 million for three years and, according to Janowitz, the researchers would use the funds to hire staff and to pay for their experimental work.
Having earned an MD and a PhD, Janowitz takes a whole body approach to cancer. He would like to address how the body’s response to a tumor can be used to improve treatment for patients. He explores such issues as how tumors interact with the biology of the host.
Semir Beyaz
Semir Beyaz, who explores how environmental factors like nutrients affect gene expression, metabolic programs and immune responses to cancer, was grateful for the support of the Mark Foundation.
Beyaz initially spoke with the foundation about potential funding several months before Janowitz arrived at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. When the researchers, whose labs are next door to each other, teamed up, they put together a multi-disciplinary proposal.
“If the risks [of the proposals] can be mitigated by the innovation, it may yield important resources or new paradigms that can be incorporated into research proposals that can be funded by the [National Institutes of Health] and other government agencies,” Beyaz said.
Janowitz wrote that he had a lunch together in a small group with Knaster, who highlighted the importance of “high-quality data and high-quality data analysis to advance care for patients with cancer.”
Michele Cleary, the CEO of The Mark Foundation, explained that the first year of the Endeavor program didn’t involve the typical competitive process, but, rather came from the Foundation’s knowledge of the research efforts at the award-winning institutions.
“We wanted to fund this concept of not just studying cancer at the level of the tumor or tumor cells themselves, but also studying the interaction of the host or patient and their [interactions] with cancer,” Cleary said. “We thought this was a fantastic project.”
With five people on the Scientific Advisory Committee who have PhDs at the Foundation, the group felt confident in its ability to assess the value of each scientific plan.
Scientists around the world have taken an effective reductionistic approach to cancer, exploring metabolism, neuroendocrinology and the microbiome. The appeal of the CSHL effort came from its effort to explore how having cancer changes the status of bacteria in the gut, as well as the interplay between cancer and the host that affects the course of the disease.
From left, Becky Bish, Senior Scientific Director, Ryan Schoenfeld, Chief Scientific Officer and Michele Cleary, CEO of The Mark Foundation at a workshop held at the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in September 2019. Photo by Constance Brukin.
These are “reasonable concepts to pursue, [but] someone has to start somewhere,” Cleary said. “Getting funding to dive in, and launch into it, is hard to do if you can’t tell a story that’s based on a mountain of preliminary data.”
Beyaz said pulling together all the information from different fields requires coordinating with computational scientists at CSHL and other institutions to develop the necessary analytical frameworks and models. This includes Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Fellow Hannah Meyer and Associate Professor Jesse Gillis.
“This is not a simple task,” Beyaz said. The researchers will “collaborate with computational scientists to engage currently available state-of-the-art tools to perform data integration and analysis and develop models [and] come up with new ways of handling this multi-dimensional data.”
Cleary is confident Janowitz and Beyaz will develop novel and unexpected insights about the science. “We’ll allow these researchers to take what they learn in the lab and go into the human system and explore it,” she said.
The researchers will start with animal models of the disease and will progress into studies of patients with cancer. The ongoing collaboration between CSHL and Northwell Health gives the scientists access to samples from patients.
With the Endeavor award, smaller teams of scientists can graduate to become Mark Foundation Centers in the future. The goal for the research the Foundation funds is to move towards the clinic. “We are trying to join some dots between seemingly distinct, but heavily interconnected, fields,” Beyaz said.
Beyaz has research experience with several cancers, including colorectal cancer, while Janowitz has studied colorectal and pancreatic cancer. The tandem will start with those cancers, but they anticipate that they will “apply similar kinds of experimental pipelines” to other cancer types, such as renal, liver and endometrial, to define the shared mechanisms of cancer and how it reprograms and takes hostage the whole body, Beyaz said.
“It’s important to understand what are the common denominators of cancer, so you might hopefully find the Achilles Heel of that process.”
While Cleary takes personal satisfaction at seeing some of the funding go to CSHL, where she and Mark Foundation Senior Scientific Director Becky Bish conducted their graduate research, she said she and the scientific team at the foundation were passionate to support projects that investigated the science of the patient.
“No one has tried to see what is the cross-talk between the disease and the host and how does that actually play out in looking at cancer,” said Cleary, who earned her PhD from Stony Brook University. “It’s a bonus that an institution that [she has] the utmost respect for was doing something in the same space we cared” to support.
The CSHL research will contribute to an understanding of cachexia, when people with cancer lose muscle mass, weight, and their appetite. Introducing additional nutrition to people with this condition doesn’t help them gain weight or restore their appetite.
Janowitz and Beyaz will explore what happens to the body physiologically when the patient has cachexia, which can “help us understand where we can intervene before it’s too late,” Cleary said.
The CSHL scientists will also study the interaction between the tumor and the immune system. Initially, the immune system recognizes the tumor as foreign. Over time, however, the immune system becomes exhausted.
Researchers believe there might be a “tipping point” in which the immune system transitions from being active to becoming overwhelmed, Cleary said. People “don’t understand where [the tipping point] occurs, but if we can figure it out, we can figure out where to intervene.”
Scientists interested in applying for the award for next year can find information at the web site: https://themarkfoundation.org/endeavor/. Researchers can receive up to $1 million per year for three years. The Mark Foundation is currently considering launching an Endeavor call for proposals every other year.
Mouhamadou Gueye drives during the first half of Sunday’s game against UNH. Photo by Andrew Theodorakis
Coach Geno Ford gathered the Stony Brook men’s basketball team by the home bench after last Sunday’s loss and told his players that he was proud of their effort and toughness. “The results are not what we signed up for,” Ford added to his team. “And we have to stick together.”
Unfortunately, Stony Brook suffered a heartbreaker Sunday afternoon. The Seawolves were edged by New Hampshire, 67-64, at Island Federal Arena. UNH swept the back-to-back games after Stony Brook returned from a 20-day COVID pause. The Seawolves had entered that pause on a five-game winning streak.
With the team’s deadlocked at 62, Nick Johnson’s layup for UNH with 93 seconds remaining provided a two-point lead for the Wildcats. Tykei Greene and Mouhamadou Gueye then were whistled for offensive fouls the next two trips down the floor for Stony Brook (6-6, 4-2 AE). Still, after a shot-clock violation by the Wildcats, spurred in part by a block from Gueye, the Seawolves had another opportunity in a one-possession game.
Juan Felix Rodriguez then was fouled while driving with 14.2 seconds remaining and the Seawolves trailing 64-62.
Rodriguez missed both free throws. And New Hampshire converted a pair of free throws at the other end for a four-point lead. A potential game-tying three-pointer shortly before the buzzer from Rodriguez also came up short.
“It’s a frustrating loss,” Ford said. “I thought the guys really battled. I thought we physically tried hard. We missed a bunch of free throws in the last six or seven minutes that we had been making most of the game. And I think losing some possessions in there really hurt. And give them credit. They hit a couple of real timely threes.”
Frankie Policelli’s driving layup with 3:18 remaining had staked Stony Brook to a 61-59 lead. However, Qon Murphy answered with a three-pointer for UNH shortly thereafter to give the Wildcats a one-point advantage. Greene then sank one of two free throws with 1:53 remaining to even the score at 62.
Four Seawolves scored in double-figures: Greene (14 points), Policelli (13), Gueye (10) and Jaden Sayles (10).
Gueye also had five blocks, giving him 101 for his career. He became the second-fastest in program history to the 100-block plateau at 45 games. Only Jeff Otchere was quicker (44). “I don’t set out to get those accolades,” Gueye said. “It kind of just happens. I know shot blocking is a big part of my game.”
Sayles returned to action after missing Saturday’s game, but was limited to 13 minutes as he eased back into play. Omar Habwe, however, missed Sunday’s contest after being deemed unavailable shortly before tip-off. The Seawolves return to action next weekend with a pair of games at conference newcomer NJIT.
The St. James General store during the holidays last year.
Hats on display at the St. James General Store.
The back room of the store features old-fashioned toys and games.
The top floor of the store features books and gifts.
The top floor of the store also features Christmas and holiday items.
The St. James General Store
By Barbara Anne Kirshner
In this strange new world of plexiglass partitions, floor stamps marking 6 foot separations and arrows directing us down aisles, it is comforting to climb those creaky wooden steps, open that squeaky green door, enter the circa 1857 house that is the St James General Store and travel back to colonial times.
I was first introduced to this singular establishment as a little girl by my Aunt Nancy who lived in Smithtown. Upon entering the store, I was met with a delectable, sweet scent that wafted through the air. Rows of glass canisters housing assorted old-fashioned candies from licorice to malted milk balls to nonpareils to ribbon candy to fudge was enough to make any child’s eyes sparkle, especially a child with a sweet tooth as big as mine.
We walked down the long aisle opposite the candy counter where bric-a-brac reminiscent of the Victorian era was displayed. Toward the back of that counter was a glass case containing one of a kind pieces of jewelry.
The back room of the store was a treat for any child and child at heart with displays of old fashioned toys including Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, wooden yoyos, assorted crafts and stuffed animals.
Opposite the toy counter was a rack of beautiful hats hinting of Victorian charm in an array of colors and decorated with ribbons, flowers or feathers. Shelves of unique scarves and gloves were arranged next to the hat rack.
We rounded the corner and headed up the rickety wooden staircase to a large room that contained a library divided into sections with books related to Long Island, children’s literature, travel and Victorian genre.
Beyond the book section, we stepped into the Christmas room where we were met with an enchanting kingdom of Christmas trees decorated with unique ornaments, stars and angels.
After my Aunt Nancy and I completed our tour, we returned to the candy counter where she invited me to choose some confection as a souvenir of our visit. I went for my favorites, the malted milk balls. As she drove us back to her house, I popped one of these delectable treats in my mouth letting it luxuriously melt away. To my delight, this tasty morsel seemed triple wrapped in rich milk chocolate; easily the best version of itself I have ever tasted and I pride myself on being a malted milk ball connoisseur.
I have returned to the St. James General Store at different stages in my life and to my delight everything has always remained the same. I have brought friends and family there, eager to see their eyes light up at every twist and turn.
I recently returned to the store for the first time since this COVID pandemic assaulted all our lives. Though the woman behind the candy counter is now separated from the public by plexiglass, I emitted a great big sigh of relief taking comfort in the familiarity from within. Everything is the same as I remember dating back to my first visit with my beloved Aunt Nancy.
If you would like a trip back to a happier, simpler time, stop into the St. James General Store where a sense of comfort will swaddle you the moment you step beyond that green door.
Miller Place resident Barbara Anne Kirshner is a freelance journalist, playwright and author of “Madison Weatherbee —The Different Dachshund.”
It was during Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration address in 1933 when he uttered the famous sentence, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
It was a call to Americans to work together to fight against dark times.
Our country has known collective terror throughout the decades, and 2020 will be remembered as the year we feared an invisible virus and people taking advantage of peaceful protests by looting stores and burning cars. That trepidation carried over into the new year as citizens watched as extremists sieged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Nearly 90 years after Roosevelt called for Americans to fight fear, we find ourselves afraid of our fellow citizens. Since the attack on the People’s House in Washington, D.C., members of Congress are worried that their safety, as well as that of their family members, is in jeopardy. Some even believe their own colleagues will harm them if they speak out against former President Donald Trump (R). Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI-03), a freshman congressman, told CNN he was afraid of possible threats after he voted to impeach Trump.
The fear has trickled down to our own neighborhoods as many are hesitant to speak their opinions, afraid if their views are more conservative than others they will be tied to the extremists who assaulted the Capitol.
There are those who once wouldn’t think twice about standing on a corner to protest or rally, even if people who held opposing views were right across the street. Now many are hesitant that their words might be met with foul language, assault and worse.
Many this past summer, during protests, witnessed foul language being exchanged between protesters and anti-protesters. Black Lives Matters participants in a rally in Smithtown in June took to social media alleging that they were assaulted. In September, a Massapequa man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a 64-year-old man who was rallying with the North Country Patriots, a conservative group that meets on the corner of Bennetts Road and Route 25A every Saturday morning.
Our times have become so divisive that many have forgotten the adversities Americans have gone through together — the Great Depression, the world wars, 9/11 and more. These horrific events didn’t leave us weaker, they left us stronger.
We became stronger because we live in a country where we have the right to pursue happiness, the right to gather, the right to express our opinions and so much more. And while we may not have the right to use those words and actions to cause harm to others or property, we have those rights.
Most of our fellow Americans get that. So let’s move forward together, stronger and more fearlessly than before with knowledge and empathy, embracing our freedoms and respecting that others in this country enjoy the same rights.
The Smithtown Historical Society has received a grant of $2,000 from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation for expenses generated during Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order, New York State on PAUSE. The announcement was made in a press release on Jan. 4.
“We received the grant in 2020 when the times were rough, and we had canceled all our fundraising events due to COVID-19. We used the grant money at a very crucial time,” said Executive Director Priya Kapoor. “We are grateful to the Gardiner Foundation for their support during these extraordinary times!”
What do we do when we meet someone new in 2021 IRL, or, to the 12 uninitiated readers, “in real life?”
Well, for starters, we can’t and shouldn’t shake hands. That ritual is probably long gone. Maybe the Japanese were right with bowing. If handshakes are out, hugs, even for those we might have been speaking to for months during the isolated pandemic, are absolutely forbidden.
If we can’t hug grandma, grandpa and other relatives we’ve known most or all of our lives, we certainly can’t hug, even casually, someone new.
Ideally, we’d stand somewhere between six and 60 feet away from them, especially if we’re inside. That could be problematic for people who can’t hear all that well and who don’t have the benefit of reading anyone’s lips anymore.
In fact, I’m thinking of going into the business of selling those Mission Impossible voice changers. If you’ve seen the movies, you know that the Tom Cruise teams can change their voices to sound like everyone else. Most of us who have heard our own voices on voicemail would like a few moments to sound more like James Earl Jones or Scarlett Johansson. Maybe we like our own voice, but we’d prefer to have a British, Australian or New Zealand accent. We could change our accents, the way we change the navigational voice on Siri and ask people if they know where we’re pretending we were raised.
Now, what we discuss is a bit tricky in the hypersensitive, polarized world of 2021. Someone who’s walking a dog most likely would be happy to talk about their four-footed companion.
I’ve been surprised by the type of questions and information people seek when they talk about my dog. People have asked not only how old he is, but also how much he weighs, as if dogs around his size are in some kind of modeling contest. Fortunately, my dog doesn’t seem particularly concerned about his weight, as he demonstrates regularly with a feverish appetite for everything from broccoli to french fries to cat vomit. Yes, he eats cat vomit, which means that if I cook something he won’t eat, he thinks it tastes worse than cat vomit, a notion that delights my teenage children.
Now, if you’re thinking about politics, you probably should keep that to yourself. Unless someone is wearing a MAGA hat or has some version of Dump Trump on a T-shirt, it’s tough to know where they stand on the plate tectonic sized political divide.
We can talk about sports, but we run the risk of someone telling us how irrelevant sports is in the modern world during a pandemic or how they wish they could return to the age when sports mattered.
Children seem like fair game, although we have to watch out for many age-related minefields.
My son, for example, is a senior in high school. Some parents are happy to tell you all the colleges that accepted and rejected their children, while others are content to share what city or even what coast intrigues their progeny, as in, “yes, my son has only applied to schools on the East Coast or in states with fewer than seven letters” (there are nine states in that category, by the way).
So, where does that leave us in the strange world where we’re all putting on masks before we go into a bank (imagine taking a time machine from 1999 and seeing those entering a bank without masks getting into trouble?) Well, the weather is often safe, as are dogs, the disruption the pandemic caused and, generally speaking, children.
The first is of a friend who knocks on my window each day that the sun is out. At first, he annoyed me, distracting me from my keyboard or my Zoom screen. But as the social distancing and the isolating in place have continued, I changed my tune.
When he doesn’t come, I miss him for he keeps me company. He has brought color to my winter world with his improbable crimson feathers easy to spot among the brown limbs of the naked trees and the often slate sky. By now you have probably guessed that I am referring to a cardinal, one who calls my property his home, too.
He is not just content to share my trees, however. He wants in to my house. Well, not exactly. When the sun is shining, he sees a reflection of my surrounding bushes in my glass windows and thinks he can just continue to fly in their direction. I give him a high mark for determination because he tries over and over again.
At the same time, I have to give him a low mark for intelligence because he doesn’t seem to learn from his abrupt crashes that the way is blocked for him. I guess the term “bird brain” would be appropriate, but I don’t want to discourage him since he reminds me that there is life outside my house, and he doesn’t seem to cause himself any damage with his efforts.
The second thing to share is that we have binged our way through the eight episodes of “Bridgerton,” a new historic series on Netflix, and I would give it a B+. It’s a little slow and talky, in the way of Jane Austen, but it has real worth for some of its subject matter. The main theme deals with the impossible position of upper class women in 19th century Europe.
The poor things had but two goals in life: to marry well and to produce heirs. This was for the good of the family and only incidentally for their own benefit, so they suffered from lots of family pressure and control. That’s old hat, though, for us 21st century viewers.
However, the series is somewhat original for populating London in the 1800s with a totally integrated cast. The Duke is black and the debutante is white, but that’s just for starters. The one theme that’s absent is any discussion of racism. There is none. You can pretty well guess how the love story ends up, but it’s fun watching the couple and their supporting cast get there.
The third subject is more serious and important to share. You know by now that our new president is making it mandatory to wear face masks in federal buildings and on planes, trains and buses that cross state lines. He is also urging the rest of us to wear masks at least for his first 100 days in office. “Observational studies have suggested that widespread mask wearing can curb infections and deaths on an impressive scale, in settings as small as hair salons and at the level of entire countries,” according to an article by Katherine J. Wu in the Science section of this past Tuesday’s The New York Times.
Now comes further advice about mask wearing. Double-masking is even better and for obvious reasons. In order for the droplets that carry the virus to get to our nose and mouth, they have to work their way through the tangle of threads in a cloth mask or the filter in a surgical one. Double the masks and we double the difficulty. The best arrangement, we are advised, would be a face-hugging cloth mask over a surgical mask. As if one weren’t miserable enough, now we are urged two.
Yes, the vaccines are here and more are coming, but it will take a while for the logistics of delivery to get ironed out. And the numbers of patients stricken with the disease keep escalating, so we have to continue to maintain our distancing, our hygiene and yes, our masks.
Students take a career DNA test before talking to professionals. From Three Village Central School District
The Three Village Industry Advisory Board didn’t let a pandemic get in the way of its annual career fair for secondary school students in the school district.
Business owners, such as Michael Ardolino of Team Ardolino/Realty Connect USA, answered students questions virtually during the annual career fair. Photo from Three Village Central School District
On Jan. 14, the board, a partnership between the district and local businesses, presented its third annual career fair. The event gave students the opportunity to talk to local professionals after they took a “career DNA” test analysis to discover their strengths. However, instead of stopping by tables set up by business representatives, the teenagers checked into Google Meet sessions to take part in 20-minute seminars where professionals presented a quick overview of what their careers entailed and then gave the students a chance to ask questions.
To help participants to choose which sessions to attend, the career DNA results assigned each student a color for various strengths and businesses were also assigned the colors.
Ilene Littman, 3V-IAB coordinator and Ward Melville High School business teacher, said the fair provided students in grades 7-12 an opportunity “to explore and learn about careers in a virtual format.” This year 308 students registered, and 21 businesses participated. Students had the opportunity to learn about banking, real estate, dentistry, the medical and financial fields and more.
“Students navigated the virtual career fair based on their career DNA, which was matched up to businesses that shared similar traits to ensure those occupations/professions are uniquely suitable for each student,” Littman said. “Using this online platform to interact with business professionals was also excellent practice because it is most likely how today’s students will be screened in the initial stage of the interview process once they are ready to embark on their job searches to enter their chosen fields.”
Alan Baum, the school district’s executive director of Secondary Curriculum and Human Resources, said he was grateful for the work Littman put into organizing the event that he described as “tremendous.”
“Orchestrating such an event is difficult enough but bringing it to fruition during the pandemic and reimagining it as a virtual career fair was a herculean task,” he said.
Baum added he was also grateful for committee co-chair Michael Ardolino and all of the participating businesses that helped with the virtual career fair. Ardolino is also the founder and owner of Team Ardolino/Realty Connect USA.
“I am thrilled that we were able to provide our secondary students the opportunity to engage with a diverse representation of the business community in our continuing effort to help the students explore future career paths,” Baum said.
Ardolino said it was interesting to see the conversations that were going on in the different sessions and how well the virtual platform worked and could possibly lead to smaller presentations in the future such as a business owner talking about how to manage the company’s money and more.
Mike Lawton of Element Energy LLC noted there were more participants than he thought there would be, and the virtual format was perfect.
“I had some excellent questions from the students, and I enjoyed every minute of it,” he said.
February is National Pet Dental Health month so I thought a discussion of periodontal disease is appropriate. Pets tend to suffer less from dental disease, and more from periodontal disease. 
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