Port Jefferson School District residents will have another chance to vote on a capital bond to fund school improvement projects, this time for $15.9 million.
This vote — scheduled for Tuesday, May 16 — comes just after the community rejected a pair of proposed bonds totaling $24.9 million last December. The district’s Board of Education approved putting the bond up for community approval at a meeting Tuesday, March 14, with the support of all six members present — trustee Ravi Singh was absent.
If the current proposal passes, taxpayers will pay for the bond in installments over several years. The vote will take place alongside the vote to approve next year’s annual district budget.
School officials suggest the proposal is more modest than the pair of bonds voted down in December, making no mention of replacing the high school’s grass sports field with artificial turf, a point of contention last time.
This bond would fund improvements to, for example, locker rooms, heating, cooling and ventilation systems, and alterations to some interior spaces. The details of this plan are on file for public review in the district clerk’s office, and the district will post more information about the new bond under the “Bond Project” tab of its website.
The board also plans to allocate more money toward capital improvement projects in the annual budget, according to Deputy Superintendent Sean Leister, which would help to pay for some facility update priorities and better plan for future needs.
“Seeing how difficult it is to go out for a bond and how hard times are, we were talking about gradually increasing the allocation,” he said while presenting the second draft of the district’s 2023-24 budget to the board. He added that he hoped this plan would mitigate the need for additional capital bonds in the foreseeable future.
Leister explained that updates to school infrastructure, health and safety — including security — and instructional classrooms would all be considered in school budgets moving forward.
“We thought by trying to incorporate those three things in future budgets, we can help bring up the level of our areas and the learning of our students,” he said.
Immediate plans for these funds include creating an ADA-compliant bathroom at the elementary school, installing a stop-arm security booth at car entrances to the middle school and high school, beginning a window replacement plan at the high school and refitting some classrooms.
Leister also noted science and computer labs would be due for remodeling, adding that “all the different areas that are functional but are maybe [from] the ‘70s or ‘80s and need to be brought up to current levels.”
Furthermore, Leister said stop-arm security booths are necessary because some GPS mapping apps list school driveways as regular roads and the administration wants to limit cut-through traffic.
The current draft version of next year’s school budget has a shortfall of $222,547. Superintendent of Schools Jessica Schmettan said this would be filled by staffing reductions to be decided before Leister presents the final budget to the board in April.
The board plans to increase the tax levy by 1.98%, just under the 1.99% cap set for the district by state regulations
Three Village Central School District plans to cut 30 full-time positions, primarily instructional staff, according to Superintendent of Schools Kevin Scanlon.
The cuts are a result of declining enrollment — district data shows the student population dropped by more than 1,500 over the last decade — and the need to stay within the 2.65% tax levy increase cap the district has calculated based on state regulations for the 2023-24 budget.
“It’s unavoidable,” Scanlon said at a March 8 Board of Education meeting, noting some 75% of the school budget is payroll. “We simply don’t have enough money to sustain where we’re at right now, financially.”
Scanlon said that cuts would not lead to larger class sizes or affect programs already in place, but rather bring staffing more in line with student population levels. Excess positions will be both in elementary and secondary, he said, adding that instructional staff will be most affected because they make up the majority of employees, and the administrative team already made cuts last year.
The meeting was a step in the process of developing next year’s school budget in advance of the May 16 community vote, which will take place in Ward Melville High School’s gymnasium.
Cost increases due to inflation have added budget challenges for the school district, according to Deputy Superintendent Jeffrey Carlson. The part of the tax levy pegged to inflation can only increase by 2% but inflation in the United States at the end of last year was 6.5%.
“It’s killing us, everything is costing so much more,” Carlson said. “We’re really going to learn the difference between ‘we need something’ and ‘we want something.’”
But, Carlson said, at this point that won’t mean taking away aspects of Three Village that make it a desirable district. These include special education services, a topic that often comes up in budget conversations since the district educates students with special needs in-house as much as possible. According to Carlson, this makes the district’s per-pupil cost appears to be higher than neighboring districts, because costs associated with sending students to BOCES programs are not figured into a district’s per-pupil expenditure numbers, while costs for in-district services are.
Carlson said at the meeting he is often asked why Three Village provides more special education services than legally mandated.
“Well, of course we do,” he said. “We give more than is mandated to all of our students,” adding that pre-K, sports, clubs and universal busing are also not mandated. “I don’t think we’d be proud of ourselves as a district if all we did was the bare minimum.”
The board is advocating with local politicians for the inflation-based cap to reflect real world inflation, Scanlon said, out of concern the rates might continue to soar.
“We are lucky for next year where it’s not going to affect programs,” he said. “But if it continues at this [rate], it will.”
The district is also seeking additional revenue streams, according to Scanlon, like renting out portable buildings to BOCES and taking on more tuition-based students from other districts. Carlson added that the district would raise rates for after-school care, enrichment programs and facility rentals for private programs.
“We certainly have not kept pace with inflation over the years,” Carlson said, adding the district has seen these programs as a kind of community service. “But those items, too, are costing more and more and more.”
The budget conversation comes just over a month after the district was labeled “susceptible to fiscal stress” by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli (D). Carlson said this designation did not come as a surprise and reflects too little money in district reserves. Three Village spent nearly $7 million in reserve funds to keep schools open full time during the 2020-21 school year, with a virtual option.
Carlson expressed pride that Three Village was one of the few districts nationwide to maintain full-time, in-person learning during the pandemic, and said refilling the coffers is a priority. He added the district is in the middle of a plan to replenish this rainy day fund over several years.
“We would love to be in a position where hopefully nothing like that ever happens again, but if it does, we could do that again if we wanted to,” the deputy superintendent said.
The board opened its meeting with a moment of silence to remember R.C. Murphy Junior High student Qamat Shah, who was struck and killed by a car while riding his bike on Thursday evening, March 2. He was 14.
The results are in. Across stakeholder categories, the clear favorite in Three Village Central School District’s restructuring survey was Option B, moving up both sixth and ninth grades to mean the two middle schools would house sixth through eighth grades, and the high school would house grades nine through 12.
Option A represented maintaining the current configuration with kindergarten through sixth grade in elementary school, seventh through ninth in junior high, and grades 10-12 in high school; Option C would have moved up only ninth grade; and Option D was the Princeton Plan, which would have split elementary schools and placed upper and lower grades in separate buildings. All four options, including Option B, left open the future possibility of closing or repurposing an elementary school.
Among district parents, staff, secondary students and the community at large, the data followed very similar trends, with the status quo coming in a distant second place when all four options were ranked against each other. “We’re so often told that different groups are in conflict with one another — schools and parents and teachers and politics,” said Deirdre Rubenstrunk, the district’s executive director of technology, at a special meeting to present survey results to the Board of Education on Monday, March 13. “But here we got to see in this data a real alignment of where people want to go, and as a school district administrator, that was really reassuring.”
The strategic planning committee recommended the board adopts Option B, but BOE president Susan Rosenzweig said they would take their time making a decision.
“We are not in a rush to make this vote; there’s a lot to consider,” she said, pointing out that there were many helpful comments and concerns written in the survey responses, especially from some forward-thinking teachers who had suggestions from the front lines. “We’re going to do what’s absolutely the very best for the kids but while remaining within our fiduciary responsibilities.”
Restructuring plans are separate from the budget planning currently in process for the 2023-24 school year, but restructuring is under consideration because of declining enrollment trends and other budget concerns.
Even if the board votes to adopt Option B in the coming weeks, that would mark only the beginning of the work, according to Superintendent of Schools Kevin Scanlon. Whatever the board decides, he said, “the work then begins for the employees of the district — the administration, the staff.”
If Option B moves forward, Scanlon said, district staff would need to go through all the nitty gritty details to figure out logistics, such as moving instructional staff, adjusting curriculum and planning to have enough guidance counselors in the right school buildings. That work, Scanlon said, would need to be finished by next December to make implementing changes for the 2024-25 school year possible. “We want to do this properly,” he said. “We don’t want to rush at this.”
Scanlon mentioned that making secondary school start times later, the part of the strategic planning committee process that wasn’t included in the survey, was still high on the administration’s priority list, but they have not yet figured out logistics and finances.
The district plans to schedule four informational meetings in coming weeks, two at night and two during the day, to explain the survey results to interested parents and community members. In the meantime, the results — including comments — are posted on the district’s website and can be found by clicking on the “District” drop-down menu and selecting “Committees.”
Indu, left, with sister Kiran Wadhwa at The Meadow Club’s new garden area. Photo from Indu Kaur
By Mallie Kim
Indu Kaur was destined to rise from the ashes.
Indu, right, celebrating Christmas with her sister Kiran and her mother several years after the train accident. Photo from Indu Kaur
Kaur, who runs The Meadow Club banquet hall in Port Jefferson Station and the Curry Club at SāGhar in Port Jefferson, was born in Afghanistan and survived a series of tragedies to become the woman she is — dedicated to family, exuding confidence and poised to solve the next problem.
In the early hours of July 14, 2018, as she watched flames shoot from the roof of The Meadow Club, Kaur made a promise. “‘The tragedy that happened to us will not happen to anybody else,’” she recalled saying to her father and business partner, Kulwant Wadhwa, thinking about the christening and wedding they were scheduled to host that day. “‘We will make sure everybody’s celebration goes on.’”
And she did, together with her father and sister Kiran, the club’s creative director. Within hours, they secured a new venue and redirected staff members and guests.
Long before Kaur was running hospitality businesses, she was a small girl gathering eggs for breakfast outside the earthen home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, she shared with her parents, grandmother, great grandmother, aunts and uncles. Life felt simple inside the multigenerational Sikh home. Kaur remembered the whole family eating meals together, sitting on traditional hand-sewn floor mattresses. After dinner was the real treat: “The whole family would do this beautiful dance, and then smile, laugh, just be free,” she said.
Outside the home, things were not so free or peaceful. In 1979, when Kaur was a toddler, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States supported the anti-Soviet rebellion of the Afghan mujahideen guerrilla fighters.
Kaur’s ancestors had immigrated to Afghanistan from India several generations before, and Kaur’s father, Wadhwa, who took over his own father’s job as pharmacist and family provider at age 15, remembered the nation with affection. “The country was very safe before the Soviet Union,” he said, recalling there were even buses of American tourists. “It all changed.”
Indu, in chef hat, with her managers and sister. Indu runs the omelet station at brunches. Photo from Indu Kaur
Smaller communities like Jalalabad became hotbeds of fighting, so in the early 1980s, Wadhwa decided to move his family to the relatively safer capital city of Kabul, where his pharmacy business thrived and the family’s lifestyle improved. They had running water, raised wooden beds and a proper school, but also a backdrop of fear, with unpredictable fighting and bullets flying. “Seeing our parents not smiling or not dancing after dinner was something we really missed,” she said.
Worse, stray bullets twice hit close to home: One bullet struck a girl at Kaur’s school, and another killed her cousin Harpreet, who was only a couple years older than Kaur. “It could have been me,” she said.
Kaur’s grandmother shielded the children as best she could, trying to bring fun into daily life. “I used to look forward to coming home and washing dishes,” Kaur said, remembering her grandmother would let dishes pile up so the two of them could wash up together after school. “I enjoyed getting wet in the soapy water, and then she would get the hose and, you know.”
In February 1989, the Soviet soldiers withdrew from Afghanistan, and for non-Muslim minorities, life worsened further. Wadhwa remembers the mujahideen, predecessors of the Taliban, told the Sikh community, “‘You guys have three options: You guys either leave the country, or die here, or you can work to be a Muslim,’” he said. “They wanted a nation of only Muslims.”
Wadhwa made plans to uproot the family once again, but not before they faced danger one more time.
Early one morning while everyone was still asleep, mujahideen soldiers came into the house, and Kaur was too far distant to reach the basement hideaway she usually crowded into with the other women and children when soldiers came around. While her father stalled the men, her grandmother laid her on a bench, Kaur recalled, and covered her with a blanket to pretend she was a cushion. “My grandmother sat on me to hide me,” Kaur said, and she remembered listening with horror to the threats and demands of the mujahideen. “They beat my dad up, big time.”
From Afghanistan to India and the U.S.
When safely in India, the family’s lifestyle improved again. Wadhwa restarted his pharmaceutical business and was more successful than in Kabul. They would once again, Kaur said, “rise up stronger.”
Indu, left, with her family in India. Photo from Indu Kaur
Kaur, 13 years old when she arrived in Delhi, attended a British school to fill gaps in her education and learn Hindi and English. She also learned what it meant to be a “country girl” refugee wearing big bows and flowery clothes, among young teens who had an eye for glamor. The bullying was brutal, and Kaur said she did what many adolescent girls around the world do — she plucked her eyebrows and changed her style to fit in. One bright spot was “a beautiful British teacher in a sari,” who inspired the confident posture Kaur still holds today, and also taught her what turned out to be a helpful survival tool — the British “stiff upper lip.” She remembered, “Always, spine straight, look straight, perfect expression.” No matter what emotion, “I could take control and just figure it out.”
This skill was vital when, at age 19 in 1994, she arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport as a new bride in an arranged marriage, a common custom in Indian culture. The day the marriage offer came, Kaur remembered Wadhwa asking if she was OK with it. Kaur reflected on how Wadhwa had led the family so far, and told him, “Whatever you do is always good for us, so [I’ll follow] whatever decision you make.”
She faced settling into life in the United States the same way she faced that first meeting with her future husband at JFK: When things were overwhelming, she went with the flow. “I was very good at smiling and keeping it quiet and having a stable face,” she said. “Emotions were always very internal.”
Internal, but not gone. Kaur is a woman who feels deeply but acts decisively. When she tired of feeling lonely in Delaware and then in Virginia, Kaur built skills, first in retail and computers, and then in banking, working her way up from teller to commercial loan inspector within a couple years. “I was a thriver, I wanted to learn,” she said. “I was eager and hungry for education and doing well.”
Kaur’s parents and younger sisters immigrated to Suffolk County as asylum seekers soon after Kaur’s wedding, once again leaving everything behind. Wadhwa built a completely new career in 1996 as a restauranteur serving Indian cuisine at The Curry Club’s first location in East Setauket, powered by family connections and the entrepreneurship he’d learned restarting his pharmaceutical business twice.
But in the fall of 2000, tragedy came again, when Kaur’s mother Amargeet was walking the dog and suffered a brain hemorrhage, falling onto the tracks at Port Jefferson railroad station. A departing train severed her arms and one of her legs, but — incredibly — she survived.
Indu at her wedding. Photo by Indu Kaur
Kaur remembered her father running to her when she arrived, devastated, in the waiting room. “He hugged me, and he said, ‘We are done, we are done. I’m destroyed. We are not going to live anymore,’” she recalled. “His heart just poured on my shoulder.”
The whole family was heartbroken by the accident, but they were not done. Everyone banded together to keep the family business running, care for Amargeet and raise Kaur’s youngest sister Kiran, who was only 11. Kaur drove nine hours from Virginia every weekend to help.
This back and forth continued for several years, but eventually the pull of family was too strong to resist. In 2013, Kaur moved to Long Island and cared for her mother full time. When her father presented the opportunity to take over The Meadow Club with her sister a year later, she was up for the challenge. Kaur remembered feeling nervous since her two children, Sahiba and Sartaj, were still young. Wadhwa told her, “Well, we have each other.”
With Kiran’s contemporary, Americanized vision and Kaur’s practical determination, The Meadow Club was a success. Then, in 2018, it went up in flames. During construction and permitting, Kaur continued to find venues for her clients and attend events to be sure clients were well served.
Meanwhile, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced restaurants to shut down in 2020, Kaur’s family survived as they always had, together. Kiran created a donation-based meal delivery service to hospital workers, Kaur drove the delivery van and her father oversaw food packing. Kaur said they delivered hundreds of meals a day.
When The Meadow Club finally reopened in January 2021, no scars of the fire were visible. The sisters had crafted a modern, classy, better-than-ever venue.
“It’s a blissful, blessed feeling of knowing that, yes, everything is up and running,” Kaur said. “But the best part is that we are together.”
And together is how she plans to weather any future storms. “I just keep going, just like my dad,” Kaur said. “We wake up in the morning: All right, it’s a beautiful day, sun is up, what’s next? What do we have to tackle now?”
Sarah Sajjad, right, in a family photo with her husband and children, was on hand for the Feb. 15 meeting with three of her children so they could witness the addition of Muslim holidays to the school calendar. Photo from Sarah Sajjad
By Mallie Kim
Artificial Intelligence could one day have a place in Three Village schools, according to Deidre Rubenstrunk, the district’s executive director of technology and data protection officer.
“If I were to submit that for an AP course, it wouldn’t get me much credit.”
— Mikaeel Zohair,
“Perhaps somewhere in the next five years, how to use AI could be part of our standards,” she told the school board at the Feb. 15 meeting. “Corporate America is going crazy over this right now, and we are going to have to prepare our students to use this as a tool.”
The comments came during time the board set aside to discuss ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool that has dominated headlines over the past few months. In January, the New York City Department of Education banned the technology from school internet networks and devices out of concerns students may use the bot to complete homework, since it can generate content based on user prompts.
But according to Rubenstrunk, Three Village would address that issue differently. “The only way that you promote academic integrity among students is not with Turnitin or originality reports in Google, but actually educating them in what integrity is and making it tangible for them,” she said, adding that is something she and other district staff are already working on.
Board members chimed in to support Rubenstrunk’s approach, emphasizing the importance of a “do not panic” attitude about emerging technologies.
Superintendent of Schools Kevin Scanlon compared ChatGPT and other AI technologies to the graphing calculator, which some schools initially saw as a threat in the classroom.
“We have to look at the technology as a tool,” he said. “We need to train staff and students on proper use of this.”
Student representative to the board, Ward Melville High School senior Mikaeel Zohair, said he was not impressed with the ChatGPT bot’s output when he played around with it using essay prompts.
“If I were to submit that for an AP course, it wouldn’t get me much credit,” he said, adding the content could maybe pass for a middle school level. “Honestly, I don’t see a practical use for it but it’s fun.”
Board member Shaorui Li said she was recently exploring the limitations of ChatGPT with some high school students, and they found it could be a helpful tool in the fight against procrastination.
“You have the machine generate something you look at and [think], ‘Oh, I can do better,’” she said, adding that hopefully it would jump-start a student’s own work.
Also on the agenda at the board meeting was next year’s April 10 addition to the 2023-24 calendar of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of the Ramadan month of fasting. Scanlon said there will be a break in state Regents exams on June 17, 2024, to allow Muslim students to celebrate Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of Sacrifice.
District parent Sarah Sajjad brought three of her elementary-aged children to the board meeting to witness the calendar change announcement.
“I wanted them to actually come and see, have an experience that they do get recognized,” Sajjad said after the meeting. She works as a special education aide in the district.
“Now everybody will be off, so we’ll welcome everybody to have fun and have a party with us.”
— Sarah Sajjad
Sajjad said she is thankful for the change because her kids have wondered why the school marks Christian and Jewish holidays with a day off, but not Muslim holidays. Plus, she added, it’s a great way for people of all religions to come together. Sajjad said her family enjoys taking part in her neighbors’ Christmas parties, but she hasn’t been able to reciprocate.
“Now everybody will be off, so we’ll welcome everybody to have fun and have a party with us,” she said. “We can actually celebrate with everybody in the community.”
The district must maintain a minimum of 900 instructional hours for elementary students and 990 for secondary, and days off vary year to year depending on which holidays fall on weekends — as does Rosh Hashanah in 2023. The district has posted the approved 2023-24 calendar on its website.
Option four in the survey, which would create primary schools for kindergarten through second grade and intermediate schools for third through fifth, has been widely panned. Setauket Elementary School pictured above. Photo by Mallie Kim
By Mallie Kim
Declining enrollment alongside a history of budget vote woes has Three Village Central School District eyeing structural changes, and the Board of Education is asking parents, students, staff and the community to weigh in by survey.
The request for community involvement, which comes after a series of public strategic planning meetings, is a step toward forming the 2023-24 district budget after last year’s budget proposal squeaked by with 66 votes and the 2021 budget failed to pass the vote at all, forcing a tighter contingency budget and no tax levy increase. The vote this spring will be the first under the leadership of new Superintendent of Schools Kevin Scanlon.
Results of the survey will weigh heavily in upcoming budget and planning discussions, according to Scanlon. “The board and administration will only consider those options which receive the majority of support from each of the groups surveyed,” he wrote by email.
The survey, which opened Feb. 2 and will close Feb. 17, includes explanatory video messages from Scanlon and asks residents to rank the favorability of four restructuring options individually and then against each other. The options include maintaining the status quo, moving up ninth grade to high school and sixth grade to middle school, moving up only the ninth grade and finally the Princeton Plan, which calls for dividing elementary students into lower and upper grade schools.
According to district data, there’s been a 23% decrease in the student population since the 2012-13 school year, from just over 7,000 students enrolled a decade ago to about 5,500 this year in grades K-12. Maintaining the current structure of district schools may only be sustainable if enrollment increases, according to Scanlon. Proposed restructuring is an effort to prepare in case enrollment continues to decline along its current trajectory. In response to rumors among concerned parents, Scanlon has emphasized at strategic planning meetings and in the survey videos that no decisions have been made about closing or repurposing any of the five district elementary schools. Any such move “would not be considered by the administration until the budget process next year for the 2024-25 school year,” Scanlon wrote.
The options on the table this year, which have been explained and discussed publicly at the strategic planning meetings, have varying popularity among local families.
Creating sixth through eighth grade middle schools and a four-year high school would bring Three Village more in line with schools across New York state and the country, give sixth graders more course and extracurricular offerings and, according to figures provided by the board, save about $450,000 per year on transportation costs alone, for ninth graders traveling to Ward Melville High School for athletics and advanced placement courses.
The proposal to move ninth grade to the high school has received a lot of public support, due to the prevalence of four-year high schools in the United States and the fact that it would save the district money. Kim Moody, who has four children spread across all levels of district schools, agrees. “I really think it would benefit the ninth graders to be at the high school,” she said, pointing to the inefficient time management for those who bus to Ward Melville for extracurriculars and for the high schoolers who have to wait for those buses to arrive. “It is an ambiguous year that ninth graders can be part of JV sports teams, but they’re still housed separately from their teammates,” she added.
Detractors at strategic planning committees have raised hallway crowding and increased traffic around Ward Melville as primary reasons for pause.Moody is less firm in her opinion about moving sixth grade up to middle school. “I don’t think they can make a wrong decision around sixth grade, personally,” she said. Moody, who works with adolescents through the Christian organization Young Life, has noticed both in personal and professional experience that students tend to make a developmental leap around the middle of sixth grade. “As a parent, the first part of sixth grade I was glad they were in elementary school, but by the second half, I would think: ‘This kid could be in middle.’”
Some parents, including Moody, say if the change goes through, the district should find ways to scaffold this variance in readiness among sixth graders during their first middle school semester and should also begin preparing fifth graders to switch classes — something district elementary schools are already piloting this year.
Option four in the survey, which would create primary schools for kindergarten through second grade and intermediate schools for third through fifth, has been widely panned at strategic planning subcommittee meetings and on social media. In the Princeton Plan, common in surrounding school districts on Long Island, classroom and special area teachers would specialize in a smaller range of grades while students in programs like the Intellectually Gifted classes would no longer have to bus to alternate schools. This option would also mean adding a school transition for students, splitting elementary-aged siblings and a lengthening commute time for some children, away from their neighborhood schools.
Data from the survey will be broken up into the four respondent groups: the community at large; parents of students currently enrolled in Three Village schools; secondary students and district staff and will be shared in the relevant committees before moving on to a formal presentation to the school board.
For more survey information, visit the district’s website www.threevillagecsd.org and click on School Restructuring Survey on the home page.
Setting secondary school start times later is a priority, but the initiative faces budget barriers, according to Three Village school district Superintendent of Schools Kevin Scanlon.
Scanlon shared his strong support for a time change at a strategic planning subcommittee Monday night, Jan. 23, where he and Deputy Superintendent Jeffrey Carlson introduced proposed alternative schedules for Three Village schools. Each alternative requires additional buses, and with New York’s 2% property tax increase cap in place, that money has to come from somewhere else in the budget, Carlson said at the meeting. “Anything that goes in, something else has to come out.”
Currently, junior high students in the district start the day at 7:40 a.m., and high school students begin at 7:05. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a start time of 8:30 a.m. or later for adolescents, citing a body of research indicating too early a start time is a prime culprit in teen sleep deprivation, which negatively affects physical and mental health — and, crucially, school performance.
“We all get the idea that the start time is too early,” Scanlon said, adding later that in his 31 years working in education, “I’ve witnessed the impact of health issues on children, [including] drugs and alcohol. This is one of them, and this is something we need to address.”
But getting secondary start times past the 8 a.m. mark is complicated due to tiered busing. Currently, the district’s fleet of 47 buses transports students in four waves, starting with the first high school pickup at 6:10 a.m., and ending with the last drop-offs at Arrowhead, Setauket and Mount elementary schools, which start at 9:25 a.m. Carlson told the subcommittee he would welcome additional schedule configuration proposals but clarified that Ward Melville High School can’t simply switch start times with the late elementary schools because its Section XI sports league requires participating schools to end by 3 p.m. And starting all schools closer to the same time would require additional buses.
The other issues currently facing the school board — proposals to reconfigure elementary schools, move ninth grade to high school and move sixth grade up to form middle schools — could make some room in the budget, as could an idea to convert an existing school into a tuition-based school of the arts.
District parents making public comment at the meeting were passionate in their dislike of the early secondary start times, with one parent calling the start time “vile,” and another comparing it to a dangerous substance, saying if the district knew a substance in the schools was causing anxiety, depression, increased sports injuries and lower test scores, “we wouldn’t balk at spending this money to do something about it, without question.”
Others suggested that the elementary school students who currently start school at 9:25 a.m. could benefit from an earlier start time since younger children tend to wake up earlier, and some families have to arrange day care before school to accommodate work schedules.
District parent Barbara Rosati, who is a Stony Brook University research physiologist and founder of an advocacy group on this issue, expressed gratitude at the meeting that the new board leadership is taking the start times seriously, but is frustrated that changes have not been prioritized in the budget up until this point.
“What we are seeing here are costs necessary to keep our kids healthy,” Rosati told the subcommittee. “Whatever we don’t do, our kids’ health is going to keep suffering.”
Scanlon, who took the helm of Three Village district last summer, emphasized that any changes the board approves would be, at the earliest, for the 2024-25 school year.
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