Parents Riled by Delay
The East Hampton School District is blaming the United States Postal Service for a delay in mailing back-to-school packets, which school officials said had resulted in parents’ flooding school offices with panicked phone calls.
During an East Hampton School Board meeting Tuesday, Richard Burns, the superintendent, said a staff member had brought four separate bulk mailings to the East Hampton Post Office on Aug. 12 and 14 and Aug. 25 and 27. The district only learned on Monday of the delay in sending the packets out of the building for processing.
The result, Mr. Burns said, was that teacher assignments, schedules, and important forms had not been received. Complicating the situation was that the Parent Portal, East Hampton’s online student information system, was experiencing problems.
Mr. Burns called the failure to deliver the packets a critical mistake. “We were caught in an unfortunate dilemma. That really threw us for a loop.” He said the district was told by a Postal Service official that a staff shortage in East Hampton was to blame.
Reached by phone yesterday, Ed O’Shaughnessy, the East Hampton postmaster, said that “bulk mailings aren’t guaranteed to go out at a specific time.” He said he could not comment on whether there was a staff shortage. “The situation has been rectified,” he said. Indeed, at least some parents reported receiving the packets on Monday.
The three school principals, Adam Fine, Charles Soriano, and Beth Doyle, explained during Tuesday’s board meeting that those parents who had provided the district with email addresses previously were able to see their children’s teachers and schedules online.
Use of the Parent Portal is enabled after the district verifies an email address for a parent, which is done through an emergency contact form — one of the documents in the back-to-school packets. The form is also available on the district’s website. School officials said that some parents already had access to the portal because their email addresses were previously used in Google Groups email blasts.
Most mail and packages brought to the East Hampton Post Office are sent first to Riverhead and then to the Postal Service’s processing center in Melville. Mail is then stamped with bar codes and sorted into trays to be delivered back to individual post offices.
“East Hampton’s district mail was sitting in boxes until my phone call” on Monday, Mr. Burns said. “We had been hustling to bring everything over there in a timely fashion.”
Critics of the Postal Service have suggested that post offices may be overwhelmed by the additional mail they receive since taking on delivery of Amazon packages in November of 2013. Bloomberg Business reported in July that first-class mail volume dropped by 3 percent to 64 million pieces from 2013 to 2014. However, the news source said, the Postal Service’s volume of packages increased by 8 percent, bringing its total to 4 billion packages, during the same period.