Education

The East Hampton School District took the lead about a year ago to apply for a state grant for radio upgrades on behalf of all schools in the town, and has received word it will receive $125,000 to share among those districts.

A report released earlier this month by the New York State comptroller says schools in the state collectively reported more than 32,000 violent or disruptive incidents in the 2017-18 school year, but specific data show very few of those incidents taking place locally.

After successfully piloting a summer camp for the last several weeks, a new educational center in East Hampton Village will kick off the coming school year with daily programs for toddlers and after-school activities for elementary children.

Janice Blair Whalen would have loved the idea of sending two children from the Linstead School, in an economically disadvantaged area in Jamaica, to the Ross School’s summer camp, her husband, Richard Whalen, said.

Butterflies, painting, homemade ice cream, a portable planetarium, and a reptile and amphibian show are coming to the East Hampton Library in what is the final full week of summer vacation for most kids.

Come September, students, parents, and community members of the Bridgehampton School District will enter through a renovated vestibule featuring a secured entrance system. The receptionist, instead of sitting at a desk in the front hallway, will sit in a new office behind a thick glass window and “buzz in” visitors.

But members of the Bridgehampton School Board have taken issue with the type of window that was installed, saying Tuesday the school architect never gave them any options beforehand.

“Substantial equivalency” is not a new term for independent schools in New York State, but a new set of regulations mandating just that, proposed by the New York State Education Department, has garnered mixed responses from officials at local private schools.

As the Springs School progresses in its installation of a new septic system, crews doing the digging discovered impermeable soils that have to be excavated and replaced by different fill for the septic system to function properly.

“Every year, we always assess whether or not we have the ability to do two teams, a J.V. and a varsity, to give our kids the maximum experience,” Mr. White said. “Sometimes as a freshman and sophomore you do a lot of sitting and watching. This particular year, considering we graduated multiple players . . . we noticed there was a burst of underclassmen in comparison to the upperclassmen.”

Ahead of next month’s start of classes, several local school districts have received updated certificates of occupancy following inspections conducted by fire marshals in East Hampton Town, East Hampton Village, and Southampton Town.

Bill O’Hearn, who served as head of school at the Ross School in East Hampton from 1998 to 2003 and most recently was in charge of the upper school, has been reappointed as head of school, the Ross School announced this week.

Meet the Animals

At the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton, the Young Birders Club, for kids 8 to 18, meets on Saturday at 10 a.m. On Sunday, children 6 to 8 can get an up-close introduction to the museum’s reptiles and amphibians in a program at 10:30 a.m.

Puppets at Bay Street

The Sag Harbor School District was poised this week to send a letter to a New York State judge in support of delaying the start of the statewide elimination of the religious exemption for vaccines for schoolchildren but reversed its position on Tuesday.

The Springs School District got a financial boost from New York State this week when Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. stopped by the school to present a check for an extra $50,000 from state coffers.     

The East Hampton School District took its first step this week toward installing solar panels and other energy-efficiency upgrades, having recently received the go-ahead from the State Education Department.     

After auditors said late last year that the Sag Harbor School District had missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York State funding for summer special education programs, district administrators came to a different conclusion: They had overestimated the amount of money they were due to collect.   

Long after William Kiraizis of Springs retired from the William Floyd High School, his marine science lesson comes full circle.

Camp Shakespeare

The Hamptons Shakespeare Festival’s Camp Shakespeare, a theater arts program for ages 8 to 15, will celebrate its 20th season when it gets under way on Monday in Amagansett.

When Jack Perna began working in the Montauk School District, the price of gas was around 39 cents per gallon and a slice of pizza cost about 35 cents. The year was 1973.

Mr. Perna was a fourth-grade teacher at the time, and has since risen to the role of district superintendent and principal. He received a pay raise and one-year contract extension, through June of 2020, from the Montauk School Board during its annual organization meeting on July 9. The 2019-20 school year marks his 24th at the helm of the district.

Bay Street Theater’s summer programs for kids in the coming weeks include a puppet camp for little ones, musical theater, Shakespeare workshops, and master classes and musical immersion for teens.

The Sag Harbor and Sagaponack School Districts have renewed a contract to share busing services again come September, but the agreement looks a bit different from the one signed about a year ago.

Parents who previously opted their children out of routine vaccinations for religious reasons will no longer be able to claim that exemption for school enrollment purposes come September.

About a year ago this month, researchers published a study on “summer learning loss,” the phenomenon in which children, over summer vacations, lose some of the skills and knowledge they worked so hard to build during the school year.

The mound of earth behind the Bridgehampton School is one of the biggest John Daniels has seen in his lifetime on the East End.

Some 10 feet tall and four or five times as long, it’s not just any old pile of dirt. It is Bridgehampton loam, and it might as well be a pile of gold.

“It’s the best soil in the whole country,” Mr. Daniels, the school’s maintenance mechanic, said this week. “You can’t find soil like this anywhere else.”

At the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, an award-winning dance ensemble from the Edge School of the Arts in Queens will perform classical ballet, jazz, African, tap, and hip-hop selections in a family program on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m.

From notebooks and pencils to binders and scientific calculators, the Montauk School’s got all school supplies covered this coming school year.

Teachers in the East Hampton schools will get a 1.75-percent pay raise next year — their largest in five years — according to a new contract that school officials say was “amicably” negotiated.

For those interested in learning what home schooling entails, an informational session called Homeschooling 101 will take place at the East Hampton Library on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. 

Teresa Loos, who leads Homeschooling 101 classes at libraries across Long Island, will give an introduction to the rules and regulations, paperwork, samples of learning materials and transcripts, programs, and resources. 

Guild Hall’s KidFest summer series of performances and workshops will begin on Wednesday at 5 p.m. when Teatro SEA presents “La Cucarachita Martina,” a bilingual puppet show about a little roach looking for love. Described as a “live-action Latin puppet show rock ’n’ roll musical mash-up,” it is appropriate for children of all ages.

Parents and community members called upon the Sag Harbor School Board on July 1 to weigh “diversity and inclusion” among the criteria when seeking out the district’s next superintendent.