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New standards will require school districts in New York state to test for lead in water. File photo

By Rebecca Anzel

Drinking water in public schools across the state will soon conclude testing for lead contamination. Legislation signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in September makes New York the first state to mandate such testing.

The law established a level of lead allowed in drinking water, initial and future testing requirements for schools and deadlines for notifying parents and staff of results.

“These rigorous new protections for New York’s children include the toughest lead contamination testing standards in the nation and provide clear guidance to schools on when and how they should test their water,” Cuomo said in a press release.

Schools are more likely to have raised lead levels because intermittent use of water causes extended water contact with plumbing fixtures. Those installed before 1986, when federal laws were passed to restrict the amount of lead allowed in materials, might have a higher amount of lead.

“We know how harmful lead can be to the health and well-being of young children, and that’s why the Senate insisted on testing school water for lead,” state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport) said in a statement. “As a result, New York becomes the first state in the nation to perform this testing and protect millions of its students from potential health risks.”

Lead consumption by children is especially harmful because behavioral and physical effects, such as brain damage and reduced IQ, happen at lower levels of exposure, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Even low levels of lead exposure can cause hearing loss, nervous system damage and learning disabilities.

“We know how harmful lead can be to the health and well-being of young children, and that’s why the Senate insisted on testing school water for lead.”

—John Flanagan

In adults, lead can cause damage to the reproductive system, kidneys and cardiovascular system.

The new law required schools teaching children in prekindergarten through fifth grade to test drinking water by Sept. 30 and schools with children from grades six through 12 to complete testing by the end of October.

This affects in excess of 700 school districts and 37 BOCES locations in the state, consisting of more than 5,000 school buildings, according to the state. Private schools are exempt from this testing.

Any lead level exceeding 15 micrograms per liter must be reported by the school to the local health department within one business day. Schools are also mandated to share the test results with parents and staff in writing and to publish a list of lead-free buildings on their websites.

Glenn Neuschwender, president of Enviroscience Consultants, a Ronkonkoma-based environmental consulting firm, said to a certain extent, these deadlines are a challenge, especially those pertaining to the test results.

“I’ve been speaking to the county health department — they’re currently not prepared to receive that data,” Neuschwender said in a phone interview. “The same would go for the state Department of Health. They’re not currently prepared to start receiving data yet, but they’ve told me that they will be within the coming weeks.”

The cost of a lead analysis ranges from $20 to $75 per sample and must be conducted by a laboratory approved by the Environmental Laboratory Approval Program. Long Island Analytical Laboratories in Holbrook and Pace Analytical Services in Melville are two approved labs, according to the state Department of Health.

If the level of lead in a sample exceeds what the law allows, the school is required to prohibit the use of that faucet until further testing shows the issue is rectified. The law also requires schools to conduct testing every five years.

“The law is certainly, I would say, a work in progress,” Neuschwender said. “The law is very short in discussing remediation — it’s more specific to sampling and action-level objectives — so we expect to see some clarification on the remediation side of things as the law is revised.”

Port Jefferson school district conducted voluntary testing of fixtures throughout the district this summer before Cuomo signed the law, and found small amounts of lead in nine locations. All nine fixtures have been replaced, according to Fred Koelbel, district plant facilities administrator.

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Stock photo.

By Victoria Espinoza

The New York State Education Department wants teachers and parents to weigh in on changes to Common Core State Standards, and voices are already criticizing the proposals.

The department released a draft of new learning standards for public comment at the end of last month, which included recommendations to change 60 percent of the English language arts standards and 55 percent of the math standards for New York state.

 “The overriding opinion is that it’s more of the same. They didn’t really make any substantive changes. These are more revised phrasing and language. They’re attached at the hip to the original standards.”

—Joe Rella

The recommendations came from two committees comprised of more than 130 parents and teachers and included creating a new early learning task force and a glossary of math verbs and English terms.

Middle Country Central School District Superintendent Roberta A. Gerold said teachers in the district will be reviewing the changes and submitting their commentary made throughout the month of October.

“I think that it’s good that state education is asking for teacher’s perspectives and comments on whether or not the revisions are appropriate,” Gerold said. “It says to me that they’re not finished with their revisions, because there are still adjustments that need to be made. Some of them were simple language changes, but I think there’s still more solid work that needs to be done.”

The NYS Allies for Public Education applauded the committee’s efforts but said due to the confining nature of the state education department the results are not substantive content changes.

“The result of their efforts is essentially just a rebranding of the Common Core,” the group said in a statement.

Comsewogue school district Superintendent Joe Rella echoed those sentiments.

“The overriding opinion is that it’s more of the same,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t really make any substantive changes. These are more revised phrasing and language. They’re attached at the hip to the original standards.”

He also said the department should have looked at the use of standards themselves.

“It was not meant to do anything but review the current standards,” Rella said. “They never got into the bigger picture, which is the appropriateness of the standards.” The superintendent said he is not anticipating anything different this school year because of the proposed modifications.

Jim Polansky, superintendent at Huntington school district, also questioned how effective these changes would be to districts.

“The truth is that the large majority of those changes are immaterial,” he said in an email. “There is still a chance that additional modifications to the new draft standards will be made following the comment period; however, I don’t anticipate that any further changes will be particularly significant either. I do not necessarily believe that the new set will be drastically different from the current Common Core.”

NYS Education Department Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said committee members spent a year listening to public comment before drafting new standards.

“Dedicated teachers, parents and educators from across the state put in countless hours to develop these new draft standards,” Elia said in a statement. “Teachers will be able to use these standards as a basis for developing their curricula and lesson plans to meet the needs of students in their classrooms. These changes reflect what I have heard from parents, teachers and administrators over the past year in my travels across the state.”

For the ELA changes, five subcommittee groups based on grade levels reviewed the original standards to see if they met the criteria for what a student should know and be able to perform at their grade level, and recommended new areas to improve standards.

Specific changes include more focus on students in prekindergarten to second grade, with an early learning task force that discusses issues for younger learners, teaching from a wider variety of texts, and developing clear communication with parents so they understand the curriculum and assignments their children are given.

Math changes include creating a glossary of verbs associated with mathematics, maintaining the rigor of standards so students are aware of what is expected of them at every grade level and providing more time for students to understand mathematics content.

Smithtown Superintendent James Grossane said his district intends to give a thorough response to the state on the changes.

“Some of the new standards reflect changes that we had already made in our local curriculum and instruction based on our own teacher and administrator input,” he said in an email. “We are providing detailed feedback to the NY State Education Department on the revised standards and will await final adoption before making any additional local changes.”

Gerold also said the reactions from the public are an important part of the process.

“I know that there’s some debate going around the state whether the changes were deep enough or developmentally appropriate,” she said. “I think all of that information will be more valid once the feedback is received from all of the stakeholders.”

To review the new English standards in more detail visit the website www.nysed.gov/draft-standards-english-language-arts, and for math standards see www.nysed.gov/draft-standards-mathematics. The public can also comment on the changes by completing a grade-level specific survey.

The public comment period ends Nov. 4.

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Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Kevin Scanlon discussed the Advanced Placement Capstone and International Baccalaureate programs at the June 20 board of education meeting. File photo by Andrea Paldy

By Andrea Paldy

Three Village school board members received mostly good news last week as they learned that student performance remains steady, district students continue to excel on Regents exams and the graduation rate holds at 99 percent.

Enrollment in Three Village schools, however, continues to decline and the opt-out rate for the contentious state standardized tests continues to be high.

That was the gist of the report given by Kevin Scanlon, assistant superintendent of educational services, at the Sept. 28 board of education meeting.

Scanlon reviewed state assessment and Regents scores, as well as graduation statistics from the 2015-16 school year.

He told board members that the district’s current enrollment is 6,271, down 3 percent from this time last year. The incoming kindergarten class numbers 339 students, compared to the junior class, which has 644 students and is the district’s largest.

Despite having fewer students, the district has nine additional teachers, enabling administrators to add electives and decrease study halls at the secondary level and reduce class sizes in all grades, especially in the elementary schools, Scanlon said.

When it came to the controversial state standardized tests administered to students in grades 3 through 8, the opt-out rate soared last spring, Scanlon reported. He said that the scores for English Language Arts and math only reflect about a third of the eligible student body and are not particularly useful to the district. Teachers’ assessments, as well as the district’s own screenings, have been more effective, he said.

Scanlon added that 66 percent of eligible Three Village students opted out of the ELA last spring. This is up from 58 percent the previous year. Math opt-outs also increased from 57 percent in the previous year to 70 percent in 2016. These numbers are higher than the 21 percent state average reported by the State Education Department.

Student performance remains steady, district students continue to excel on Regents exams and the graduation rate holds at 99 percent

The district’s proficiency rates surpassed the average rates for Nassau and Suffolk counties, as well as for New York State, Scanlon said. Proficiency rates went up statewide by 6.6 points to 37.9 percent for ELA and one point to 39.1 percent for math.

For Three Village, the ELA proficiency in grades three through eight ranged from 57 percent to 78 percent, while math proficiency — excluding eighth grade math — ranged from 62 percent to 87 percent.

Eighth grade math scores showed only 21 percent proficiency because only a small portion of eighth graders were tested, Scanlon said. A number of the district’s eighth graders take Algebra, and therefore take the Algebra Regents exam instead of the state math assessment, he explained. The rate of passing for the Common Core Algebra Regents exam was 96 percent, with 75 percent of the students achieving mastery — a score of 85 percent or higher.

When compared to scores in nearby districts — Commack, Half Hollow Hills, Harborfields, Hauppauge, Northport, Port Jefferson and Smithtown — Three Village ranked either first or second in proficiency for the ELA, and it ranked first or second in math for grades 3 through 6. It ranked fourth for grade 7 and fifth for grade 8.

District students continued to excel on Regents exams. Students who took the first-ever Common Core ELA Regents exam passed at a rate of 97 percent, with 90 percent also achieving mastery. The rates of passage for social studies and most sciences were in the 90s, with high rates of mastery. Physics had an 89 percent rate of passage. Most math Regents pass rates were in the high 80s, except for Common Core Algebra II, which was 77 percent.

Three Village students also performed well on the SATs, scoring above the state average in both the math and the critical reading sections.

Continuing the trend from the year before, the class of 2016 had a 99 percent graduation rate and 95 percent college acceptance rate. Last year’s graduating class boasted the highest number of Advanced Placement scholars since the district started tracking in 1999, Scanlon reported. Seventy-six percent of 2016 graduates went on to four-year colleges, and 20 percent went to two-year colleges.

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Ward Melville high school boys’ fencing coach Jeff Salmon with his saberist Solomon after the athlete won the Konin Cadet World Cup in Poland. Photo from Three Village school district

Ward Melville fencer Danny Solomon had to overcome a familiar foe to reach new heights — New Jersey’s Mitchell Saron.

The two faced off on the strip six times prior to the Konin Cadet World Cup in Poland Sept. 25, but Solomon’s record against his opponent was 0-6.

“For the past five or six tournaments we ran into each other — it’s been a major roadblock for me whenever I come up to him,” the saberist said. “I always cracked under pressure, but this time I knew if I stayed calm, that he’d crack this time.”

Danny Solomon reacts after beating Mitchell Saron. Photo from Konin Cadet World Cup
Danny Solomon reacts after beating Mitchell Saron. Photo from Konin Cadet World Cup

Solomon was riding a high that day prior to facing off with is archrival. He tied for first with another American from Colorado at the end of the qualifying round the day before, and cruised past Russian and Polish opponents 15-3, 15-9, 15-8 and 15-3 in the four direct elimination rounds prior to the bout against Saron.

“No one could really touch me,” Solomon said.

He beat Saron 15-13, and finished the day with one final bout, which he won for gold, earning him a No. 1 international ranking in cadet.

“I was ecstatic,” Solomon said of getting past Saron. “I’ve been going to international tournaments for the past three years now and each year I’ve been improving and seeing the older kids doing well. This year, with me being the oldest kid in the category, I wanted to make my mark, and I’ve been training hard for a long time now. It’s good to reap the benefits of my hard work with my victory.”

Solomon has been training with Jeff Salmon of Mission Fencing Center in Rocky Point for five years. Salmon is also his high school fencing coach.

“Danny is an extremely good competitor,” Salmon said. “He takes coaching and direction well. He’s eager to be the best he could be.”

Salmon has worked with plenty of high-ranking fencers, but said he’s never had a gold individual at the world cup level.

“He was extremely focused the whole tournament — from beginning to end,” the coach said of his pupil. “He had his goal in mind and he was doing everything he could to put himself in the best particular place possible, without exception.”

The tournament featured 167 fencers from 16 different countries. Although Solomon has been fencing since sixth grade, he is always seeking to improve. He said intense training went into preparing for the world cup bouts. Salmon said he and his student added several new techniques, and he was happy to see his fencer’s hard work come to fruition.

“You could see the pride,” Salmon said. “He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, and he deserved it.”

The saberist was happy to have his coach at his side.

Danny Solomon and Mitchell Saron compete on the strip. Photo from Konin Cadet World Cup
Danny Solomon and Mitchell Saron compete on the strip. Photo from Konin Cadet World Cup

“He’s really helped me grow, not just as an athlete, but as a person,” he said. “Knowing that he’s experienced and had other people in these types of situations is really comforting.”

Solomon competed in the North American Cup in Detroit this past weekend, and did not have the same success, but finished ninth in cadet, which encompasses all fencers under 17, and ninth in Division I, which is an open category.

“I was hoping to finish close to the top in cadet, but Mitchell edged me out,” Solomon said. “But I’ll learn from it. In the open category, I had blood on my teeth from the day before, so when I got to the Top 16, I was one of the top-seeded people from the qualifying rounds.”

He ended up edging out Saron in Division I that next day.

Solomon is still ranked No. 1 in America, and is third internationally. He said he has enjoyed seeing his progress over the last few years, and is proud to see how the sport has changed him. But for now, he’s just looking forward to the rest of the season.

“When I started fencing I was a short, lanky kid, and now I’ve grown and I’m a tall, lanky kid,” he said, laughing. “But this sport has been amazing to me. It has given me some of my closest friends. It’s opened my horizons to other ways of thinking and showed me that no matter where they come from, no matter what language they speak or how old they are, there’s always a connection between fencers. We love the sport. Now, I’ll just keep training. But this has been a huge confidence booster. ”

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President Donald Trump suspended entry from seven countries last week. File photo

As an editorial staff, we have an opinion. …

The first half of that sentence isn’t necessary in order to reveal what we think. And that is the exact problem we have had with this past weekend’s news cycle.

Political leader after political leader came out this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday to condemn Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s leaked comments, bragging about being able to commit sexual assault against women.

One of the common themes from legislators who pulled their endorsements was “As a father of daughters” or “As a brother with sisters — or a mother,” they were offended.

Two problems here: You don’t need to be a “someone” in order to be offended, you can simply be offended. And why is it that women are repeatedly being referred to as a sister, a daughter or a mother?

A presidential candidate talked about how he can sexually assault women because he is a star. A woman doesn’t need to be anything to be offended, threatened or violated by that sentiment. A man is also not disqualified from finding Trump’s comments reprehensible simply because he is a man.

Women don’t need to give birth or have a brother before they can be victimized by Trump’s words. Men don’t need to be married to condemn sexual assault. It should not matter your role, your background or your stature — no one should need to back up or justify why they are against sexual assault. They just should be.

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Photo courtesy of The WMHO

Blast from the Past: Do you know when and where this photo was taken? What show are these people getting ready to see? Email your answers to [email protected]. To see more wonderful vintage photographs like this, visit The Ward Melville Heritage Organization’s ongoing exhibit, It Takes a Team to Build a Village, at The WMHO’s Educational & Cultural Center, 97P Main Street, Stony Brook. For more information, call 631-751-2244.

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Front row, from left, Liliana Dávalos, Heather Lynch and Christine O’Connell; back row, from left, Robert Harrison, IACS director and STRIDE PI, Arie Kaufman, and Janet Nye. Photo from Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

If Stony Brook University has its way, the university will stand out not only for the quality of the research its graduate students produce but also for the way those budding scientists present, explain and interpret their results to the public and to policy makers.

Pulling together faculty from numerous departments across the campus, Robert Harrison, the director of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, created a program that will teach graduate students how to use big data sets to inform difficult decisions.

The institute recently received a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship for this effort, called Science Training & Research to Inform DEcisions, or STRIDE. The grant will be used for students in the departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, Ecology and Evolution and the schools of Journalism and Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

“This is unique,” said Arie Kaufman, a distinguished professor and chair of the Department Computer Science at Stony Brook. “It’s a new kind of approach to training and adding value to Ph.D. students.” Indeed, the students who complete the STRIDE training will earn their doctorates and will also receive a certificate for their participation in this program. Students in the participating departments will need to apply for one of the 10 positions available in the program next year. The partners involved in this program expect it to expand to 30 students within five years.

Kaufman said what enabled this collaboration was the range of skill sets across Stony Brook, including the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which is a growing program that already offers the type of training more typical for an actor studying improvisation techniques than for a scientist studying neurotransmitters or DNA.

The Alda Center is “creating a new course,” said Christine O’Connell, an associate director at the center and assistant professor in the School of Journalism. She is currently working on developing the course description, which will include communicating to decision makers. O’Connell, who has a doctorate in marine and atmospheric sciences, sees her work with the Alda Center and with STRIDE as the “perfect combination in bringing the decision making piece to work with scientists to help them talk about their research.”

Scientists who take courses at the Alda Center with STRIDE learn how to understand their audience through various role-playing scenarios. They will also develop their abilities to present their goals or messages in a visual way and not just talk about their work.

Heather Lynch, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution who is also a co-principal investigator on the STRIDE grant, will help design the program, mentor students and develop courses. She’s been involved with this proposal since its inception, over three years ago. “In many ways,” she explained in an email, “my interest stems from my own difficulties communicating effectively with policy makers, and finding tools and visualizations that are compelling to a non-scientist.” Lynch recounted her frustration with presenting science to help a policy making body, such as a committee, with the kind of analysis she believed they were seeking. After she did her best to answer the question, the committee sometimes dismissed her work as not being what they wanted. “That’s frustrating because that means I failed at the outset to define the science question and that’s what I hope we can teach students to do better,” Lynch explained.

Lynch said she wishes she had the training these students will be getting. For scientists, computers are an invaluable tool that can help delve into greater breadth and depth in analyzing, interpreting and collecting information. The STRIDE effort includes a greater awareness of the way computers can inform political or social science. Researchers generate “tremendous amounts of data that can be used to analyze trends or detect diseases,” Kaufman said. “The data science is tremendous in every discipline.”

The faculty who are a part of this program said they have already benefited from the interactions they’ve had with each other as they’ve developed the curriculum. “I know a few people in Ecology and Evolution and I know more people in Marine Sciences, but these particular individuals were new to me,” said Kaufman. “We have already been communicating about ideas for how to use the Reality Deck for other projects.”

Completed in late 2012, the Reality Deck is a $2 million rectangular room in the Center of Excellence in Information Technology building. The room has hundreds of monitors that cover the wall from floor to ceiling and provides a way for researchers to study images in exquisite detail.

Other scientists in the program include Liliano Dávalos, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Janet Nye, an assistant professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Joel Saltz, the founding chair of the Depatment of Biomedical Informatics, Erez Zadok, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Mighua Zhang, a professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

Lynch said the program will bring in people who are working on real-world problems, including those in government, industry and nongovernmental organizations who are “in a position to take science and use it for practical purposes.” As a part of the program, the scientists will monitor the progress of the STRIDE candidates, O’Connell said.

The evaluations will check to see if “they become better communicators and better at interpreting their data for different audiences,” O’Connell said. “The evaluation piece built in will help us assess the program.”

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Dr. Samuel L. Stanley

By Dr. Samuel L. Stanley

Implementation of Stony Brook University’s new Plan for Equity, Inclusion and Diversity is off to a great start, with several initiatives underway to take us to the next level in enhancing student, faculty and staff diversity and building an inclusive community.

Gender equality is one of the focal points of our plan. As one of 10 University IMPACT Champions worldwide for UN Women’s HeForShe movement, Stony Brook is committed to being a national leader in gender equality and serving as a model for other colleges and universities.

HeForShe encourages men and boys to become agents of change in achieving global gender equality by building on the work of the women’s movement as equal partners, crafting and implementing a shared vision of gender equality that will benefit all of humanity. For Stony Brook, HeForShe provides a visionary and sound foundation from which we can work to improve diversity and the human condition on our campus and beyond.

To highlight our commitment to achieving gender equality, Stony Brook University co-hosted the HeForShe second anniversary event, welcoming world leaders, activists, change-makers and celebrities to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on Sept. 20. At the event, we celebrated the launch of the first HeForShe IMPACT 10×10×10 University Parity report, which charts Stony Brook’s progress toward gender equality along with nine other leading universities from around the world.

Some of our progress includes building gender sensitization programming and gender equality themes into our mandatory freshman seminar class; forming a HeForShe Steering Committee of students, faculty and staff to oversee the implementation of our commitments; and hosting the first SUNY-wide HeForShe conference last March to work with all 64 SUNY campuses in developing programs to increase gender equality, giving us the potential to impact the experiences of more than 459,000 students and almost 90,000 faculty and staff.

Stony Brook is also now a leader in the field, offering the first-ever master’s degree program in masculinities studies within the university’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities led by Distinguished Professor of Sociology Michael Kimmel.

On Sept. 12, Stony Brook welcomed Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women and under-secretary-general of the United Nations, who delivered a timely and provocative lecture to our students, faculty and staff. To quote Mlambo-Ngcuka: “There aren’t enough universities in the world that have put this issue at the center of our work. It is in universities where we produce thought leaders and people who can truly change the world.”

Stony Brook is proud to be a pioneering university in our progress toward gender equality. Visit stonybrook.edu/diversityplan and stonybrook.edu/heforshe for more information.

Dr. Samuel L. Stanley Jr. is the president of Stony Brook University.

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Dresses on display at The Long Island Museum’s current exhibit, Long Island in the Sixties. Photo by Heidi Sutton

On Saturday, Oct. 22 from 9:45 a.m. to 3 p.m., The Long Island Museum, 1200 Route 25A, Stony Brook will celebrate its blockbuster summer exhibition Long Island in the Sixties with a full-day symposium of the same name.

By the close of the 1960s, although the Long Island region had become more economically prosperous than 27 states, it was experiencing a wide array of social, political and cultural changes that went beyond demographic shifts and industrial development.

Five guest speakers will explore some of the most trenchant developments that occurred across the region during the 1960s. Join them to examine and more deeply understand the lasting impact that suburban and economic trends, the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, the local Civil Rights Movement, regional architecture and Long Island’s popular music made on this local area and in the United States at large.

Music historian John Broven will be a guest speaker at the symposium. File photo
Music historian John Broven will be a guest speaker at the symposium. File photo

Presenters will include Stephen Patnode, associate professor of history and acting chair of Farmingdale State College’s Department of Science, Technology and Sociology; Christopher Verga, professor of history at Suffolk County Community College and author of “Civil Rights on Long Island,” Arcadia Publishing Inc.; Caroline Rob Zaleski, preservationist and architectural historian and author of “Long Island Modernism, 1930-1980,” SPLIA and W.W. Norton; Lawrence R. Samuel, independent scholar and American cultural historian and author of “The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair,” Syracuse University Press; and John Broven, music historian and custodian of the family-owned Golden Crest Records and author of the award-winning “Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans,” Pelican Press, and “Record Makers and Breakers,” University of Illinois Press.

Participants will enjoy Q-and-A sessions with all speakers, lunch break and optional self-guided tour of the Gilding the Coasts exhibition. Admission is $12 adults, $10 for students, seniors and museum members (there is an additional, optional $10 lunch fee). Preregistration and prepayment are required. All fees include general museum admission. For more information, call The Long Island Museum’s Education Director Lisa Unander at 631-751-0066, ext. 212.

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Andrew and Susan Ackerman are among the leaders of the "Save the Stony Brook Street Trees" effort. Photo by Donna Newman

The Sept. 29 Brookhaven Town Board meeting seemed to provide proof of Margaret Mead’s assertion: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Homeowners from the Strathmore M-section of Stony Brook were in attendance at the meeting, again seeking help to retain sycamore trees on their streets, which had been marked for removal by the Highway Department in preparation for repaving several roads. They listened as town Attorney Annette Eaderesto gave a statement at the beginning of the meeting.

Referencing the residents’ concerns, expressed at the Sept. 1 board meeting, Eaderesto said, “The supervisor directed the Law office and [the Division of] Land Management to get involved in this situation,” explaining that John Turner [the town’s open space program coordinator] visited the area, took many pictures and also took pictures of other roads, which had been paved using curb bump-outs, so that the trees would be saved.

“The project is totally on hold now,” Eaderesto said. “Your trees are not in danger.”

She added she had confirmed the hold with the deputy supervisor of highways, Steve Tricarico. Further, she indicated that Supervisor Ed Romaine (R) would put forth a resolution at the next Town Board meeting, which will establish a “tree committee” so situations like this will not recur in the future. “There’ll be much more communication,” she said. Eaderesto’s statement was met with audience applause.

M-section homeowners gather on Mariner Street to pick up spools of green ribbon to tie around trees marked for removal. Photo by Donna Newman
M-section homeowners gather on Mariner Street to pick up spools of green ribbon to tie around trees marked for removal. Photo by Donna Newman

“We’ll be dealing with a solar code that will not allow any solar [projects] to be done by taking down trees,” Romaine said. “We think Brookhaven should stay as green as it possibly can.”

Eight speakers addressed the board regarding the progress made on retaining the trees. Most of them expressed gratitude to the board, the supervisor and the town attorney for listening and responding to their pleas.

The organizers of this community effort are cautiously optimistic.

“We were surprised [by the town attorney’s statement],” said Susan Ackerman. “We’d like to find out specifics before we truly relax. What is the plan for the M-section?”

While the residents want to preserve the healthy, mature trees in the M-section, Ackerman said she’d also like to see a more modern paving policy throughout Brookhaven town.

“We had so much stuff we were going to say [at the board meeting],” said M-section homeowner Tom Caputo. “We think it was good [referring to the town attorney’s statement], but we’re still walking on eggshells.”

They both plan to watch the Sept. 29 board meeting video online, so they can listen closely to Eaderesto’s words.

“The paving project is on hold while we evaluate all of the options available to minimize disruptions to the neighborhood, while improving our infrastructure,” wrote the office of town Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro (R) in an email statement.

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