From the school district…

At its April 24th  Board Meeting, the Peekskill Board of Education appointed Dr. David Fine  principal of Peekskill Middle School. Dr. Fine – an educator with over 15 years of experience, is presently Middle School/High School Assistant Principal in the Putnam Valley Central School District. He assumes his new duties on July 1, 2008.

“After an extensive search, the district has chosen someone who understands and has experienced the challenges and opportunities that characterize teaching and learning to high standards in a culturally diverse school district. Dr. Fine, who taught for nine years in the East Ramapo Schools System before beginning his administrative career, established an outstanding reputation as a caring, creative and nurturing educator. He will assume the leadership needed to ensure the opening of the new middle school this fall is smooth and exciting. This is a task that will require engaging the support of our parents, students, staff and community residents. We welcome him to our district and look forward to supporting the talent and vision we know he will bring to our school system” said Superintendent of Schools, Judith Johnson in her introduction.

Since 2003, he has worked as Vice Principal at the Putnam Valley High/ Middle School, where his  responsibilities have included; supervisor for instructional technology programs and initiatives, Scheduling, Community and County outreach, Grant Writing, Middle and High School mentoring and transition  programs, Safety/Security, Student Management and Staff Development.

Non-profit housing agency Westhab Inc. is holding an event this week to mark National Volunteer Recognition Week, and will give Manhattanville College students its “Presidential Service Award” for their work with homeless children.

The event is Wednesday evening at the college’s Reid Castle.

A full list of honorees after the jump: Read more of this entry »

Students from seven Westchester schools will compete Tuesday in the Hudson Valley Regional Envirothon.

What’s an envirothon, you ask? Well, county officials tell us, “The event is organized around five areas: soils, aquatics, forestry, wildlife and a current environmental issue. The winning team from each participating county is eligible to go on to the NYS Envirothon at SUNY Cobleskill on May 21-22.”

The event will be held at the Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill. There are 11 Westchester teams in total, from the following high schools: Hastings, John Jay (Katonah-Lewisboro), Ossining, Putnam-Northern Westchester BOCES, Scarsdale, Walter Panas (Lakeland), and Yorktown.

The event is supported by the Westchester County Soil and Water Conservation District with assistance from the county Department of Planning.

Last week Monroe College cut the ribbon on Ustin Hall, a 32,000 square-foot building that is the new Bronx campus home to the King Graduate School of Business and the Monroe School of Business. The School of Business will be operating a Center for Entreprenurial Excellence there; the new building will also house the award-winning Students in Free Enterprise team.

The King Graduate School of Business awarded its first Master’s degrees in the spring of 2007 and will be introducing finance and health care concentrations in the fall. The 20-classroom building is located at 2375 Jerome Avenue on the corner of 184th Street, and is the sixth building on the college’s Bronx campus. It was named in honor of Joan Ustin, the Chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, and is partly powered by a solar panel on its roof.

Alexa Luiso and Christi Marraccini, both 17-year-old Harrison High students, were very frank when they spoke to me about how cancer affected them—both their older sisters were diagnosed with leukemia.

They spoke about how the school rallied around both their sisters—Toni Marraccini as an elementary-age child about a decade ago and Amanda Luiso last year—and how they relied on each other for immediate support when everybody was taken up with the older girls’ illness.

“When I first found out, it was hard for me to get back into the school mode. There’s six of us at home. I feel we came together as a family. When I came to school, I couldn’t take my mind off of what was happening at home. I was worried about my grades falling—junior year is very important, it’s the most important year. I wrote my college essay on just getting through everything, ” Alexa said.

“That Monday, just going into school, I didn’t even want to come,” she said. “We would break down during periods. We went to meet with the psychologist and she explained this was a hard time, it’s going to be hard to come to school. We’ll get through it together.”

A student from the French-American School of New York recently placed ninth in a  worldwide “French Kangaroo Math” contest.

Matthias Wickenburg took the honor out of 8,000 eleventh graders around the world. More than 3.5 million francophone students in Grades 3 to 12 participated in the worldwide competition in March. The test consists of 24 math brain teasers that must be answered within 50 minutes.

FASNY students are required to take the test in Grades 6 and 8, and can opt to take it in Grades 7 and 9 to 12. FASNY students have participated in the competition since 1993, two years after it started. Matthias’ score was the highest in FASNY history.

The bilingual, bicultural school has more than 800 students on three campuses located in Larchmont, Scarsdale, and Mamaroneck.

Purchase College reports that  Jon Esser, Associate Dean of the Purchase College School of the Arts, has received a $16,000 grant from the Dana Foundation’s ArtsBridge America program, via Lawrence University. The grant will fund four School of the Arts students to be ArtsBridge Scholars, teaching the arts to children in underserved schools through residencies.

Here’s more from the school: “The scholars will each be selected from one of the four visual and performing arts disciplines on campus, via a competitive process. The scholars will then assigned faculty mentors from their disciplines and will undergo training from a teaching artist in the following areas: K-12 learning environment, how to create ties between the arts and other curricular areas, how to create lesson plans and how to adapt teaching styles to be age and demographic specific.”

“Students will submit lesson plans for review and approval and will then be placed in local underserved school systems with the support of a classroom teacher as well as their Purchase faculty mentor. A residency at the local school will culminate in final performances both at the local schools and on campus. ”

… ” ArtsBridge is a network of 22 universities in 13 states and Northern Ireland, and their surrounding schools, that confronts the problem of the elimination of the arts from K-12 schools. Purchase’s award is part of a larger $60,000 grant to Lawrence University from the Dana Foundation’s ArtsBridge America program. ”

Gary Armida, whose wife was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after they were married, spoke a little about his response to student writing when the subject matter is something as sensitive as a reaction to cancer in a family member or friend. Armida teaches English at North Rockland High School. He says that he’ll sometimes write a little note on an essay letting a student know that he understands.

“I do think kids look for a sounding board. They’re going to need your support and supervision at the same time. It’s tough. It’s tough.

“You sit there and you appreciate that they have enough courage or trust in you to share it. I do find that 90 precent of the kids are very willing to share, especially on paper.

“It’s hard to read a lot of them, it’s hard to throw a grade on them. I still struggle with that. I think other teachers struggle with that. How do I grade this? These are part of the problem, but it’s not even a problem related to writing. It’s all on the cuff. You fly by the seat of your feet. Every kid is different.”

At the end of my interview with four North Rockland High sophomores, I asked them about their thoughts of death and whether being touched by cancer changed the way they thought about the future. I asked them their views on people they knew who had been diagnosed with cancer.

Here are some of their responses:

Nikki Esposito, 16: “I think you just live your life. You don’t know when it could be taken away. You should live it to fullness…definitely, you look at people though different eyes because … they have been through so much and they’re still walking tall and you look at them through a whole different perspective. I would look up to them just because of so much courage, look at the glass half full and not look in the past.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “I’m extremely optimistic. When I read, I like to learn about good, how someone overcame something, they broke down walls…. It’s not so much I’m afraid of death. Death doesn’t scare me, but I worry ‘what’s going to happen to my sister if I wasn’t here’ or ‘what would be the reaction on my grandmother’, ‘what would I do without my mother?’ It’s the other people, the people left behind.”

Putnam Valley High School is celebrating academic achievement this month! A new plaque was dedicated and hung in the building’s foyer, listing the names of all of the valedictorians and salutatorians to date, with new names to be added each year.

The high school opened its doors in 2000 and its first class graduated in 2004. The honorees to date are:

2004 – Jared Berner- Valedictorian; Michael Ammann, Salutatorian

2005 – Greg Curreri – Valedictorian; Scott Pelletier – Salutatorian

2006 – Maggie Chesnut Valedictorian; Nicole Ricapito Salutatorian

2007 – Tony Rush – Valedictorian; Alyssa Marsico – Salutatorian

2008 – Shannon Brown —Valedictorian; Hannah Schmidt — Salutatorian

The editorial board here has updated, and in some cases amended, the list of dates and times for interviews with candidates seeking the paper’s op/ed endorsement. Here’s the full list:

Interview schedule
Westchester
Ardsley: 3 p.m., Monday, May 5
Blind Brook: 3 p.m., Thursday, May 1
Briarcliff Manor: noon, Wednesday, May 7
Chappaqua: 10 a.m., Tuesday, April 29
Eastchester: 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 29
Greenburgh: 4 p.m., Monday, April 28
Harrison: 4 p.m., Wednesday, April 30
Hastings-on-Hudson: 9 a.m., Wednesday, April 30
Irvington: 9 a.m., Tuesday, April 29
Katonah-Lewisboro: 3 p.m., Tuesday, April 29
Lakeland: 2 p.m., Wednesday, April  30
Mount Pleasant: 4 p.m., Thursday, May 1
Mount Vernon: 5 p.m., Monday, May 5
North Salem: 10 a.m., Thursday, May 1
Pocantico Hills: 2 p.m., Thursday, May 1
Port Chester: 3 p.m., Tuesday, May 6
Somers: 11 a.m., Wednesday, May 7
Tarrytowns: 2 p.m., Tuesday, May 6
Valhalla: 4 p.m., Monday, May 5
Yorktown: 3 p.m., Monday, April 28

Putnam
Mahopac: 4 p.m., Tuesday, May 6
Putnam Valley: 3 p.m., Wednesday, April 30
All Westchester and Putnam interviews will be held at our White Plains
office, 1 Gannett Drive (off Westchester Avenue, between Corporate Park
Drive and Bryant Avenue).

Rockland
Clarkstown: 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 30
East Ramapo: 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 29
Nanuet: 3 p.m. Monday, May 5
North Rockland: 5 p.m., Friday, May 2
Nyack: 3 p.m. Thursday, May 1
Pearl River: 3 p.m. Friday, May 2
South Orangetown: 3 p.m. Tuesday, May 6
Rockland interviews will be held at our West Nyack office, 1 Crosfield Ave.,
off Route 59.

I asked four students from North Rockland High School whether they’ve Googled information on cancer and three said yes.

Nikki Esposito, 16, said she didn’t. This was her reason:

“I haven’t looked. I’m scared I will be more conscious and I will be paranoid. I don’t want to know the signs of cancer. I don’t want to be more aware ‘my grandma’s getting to THAT stage. I don’t want to be that fearful. I don’t want to put a timeline on someone’s life.”

I asked four North Rockland High School students whether school was less important or more important to them while they were dealing with family or other close acquaintance cases of cancer, and how being touched with cancer affected their schooling:

Jared Rajchgad, 15: “For me, it hasn’t affected me or work although you know it’s always there. When I’m in school, I’m focusing on my schoolwork, trying to block out everything that’s distracting.”

Nikki Esposito, 16: “School was a (place) to come to clear your head and escape. You have protection.”

Raven Hopkins: “It’s a way to block out everything else. When you are in school, you are suppoed to be more about school. It’s hard to block things out, but the only way to really succed is to focus in, drill in. School was like an escape, that’s why a lot of kids do after-school activities.”

Spencer Kennard: “I don’t (believe) it really affects my school work. I don’t feel I’m trying to suppress anything. Someone that’s dealing with cancer, they’re appreciating things a lot more.”

I asked four North Rockland High School students whether they talk about their experiences, their worries, their fears about cancer with school people—psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors—or if they didn’t tell anybody at all and just kept things to themselves:

Nikki Esposito, 16: “I probably wouldn’t broadcast if someone I know or I had cancer, but I know I have my close friends and family and know they are my backbone. I would feel comfortable talking about that, they would comfort me or support me. Cancer is a very serious matter. I don’t feel comfortable sharing it with people.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “Me and my close, close friends, we sit and have serious conversations, we talk about things that go out in the world. It’s a group of best friends, the four of us. When I was younger, I kept all my problems to myself. My feeling now is you vent your feelings.

Hopkins continued, “I tell my mom everything. If I ever have a concern, we can talk about it. If I’m going through a hard time, she’s going through it with me. It’s easy for me to share things with her, we’re so close. She has lost a lot of her friends and a lot of people (to cancer). I know that I can look up to her.”

Jared Rajchgod, 15: “I would definitely talk about it with my family, my mom and dad, if I had a problem. Even it’s kind of a scary thought, I was always comfortable asking them: Mom, do I have cancer?”

I spoke to four North Rockland High School sophomores about whether they pay attention to people who come to talk to them during assemblies. Here are some of their responses:

Jared Rajchgad, 15: “I feel people should be made more aware of the smoking because people almost take it for granted, like you should definitiely take more care. It can take your life very quickly. Maybe in school they should hold programs on how serious it is, show the students that cancer is a very serious thing.”

Raven Hopkins, 15: “I think I would pay attention to someone with experience, otherwise it’s going to be boring because he has no idea what he’s talking about. He knew some person, but has not personally been through something like that? If it’s not something you’ve faced, there’s no ‘umph’ to it. Nobody really cares what you have to say unless you have hard evidence.”

Nikki Esposito, 16: “If you don’t have an experience suffering with cancer, then you don’t undertand all it entails.”