Education

Saying the district is “greatly troubled” by the fact that schools are widely used as polling sites during elections, Richard Burns, the East Hampton School District superintendent, has sent a formal letter to the Suffolk County Board of Elections requesting it find other places for people to vote.

With the start of the school year comes the start of a new session for Southampton Town’s Youth Court. The program is a way for high school students to earn community service credits and build their college résumé, while learning about the criminal justice system. High schoolers work together to hold real trials for juvenile offenders, and a jury decides on a sentence for the offender. Cases heard in youth court range from trespassing, driving without a license, and under-age drinking to harassment, possession, and theft.

The Sag Harbor School Board held its architect’s feet to the fire on Monday as he announced that the new Sag Harbor Learning Center, formerly the Stella Maris Regional School, will not be completed until the end of December.

The first day of school on Sept. 4 brought a few more students to some local schools than there were this time a year ago, while others experienced a decline in enrollment. Officials across the public schools say the numbers will change before they report official data to New York State in October.

The Montauk Library will be busy this week with programs both practical and fun. On Saturday, kids in second grade and up can drop by all day to personalize their composition books with supplies provided by the library.

Given a recent spike in cyberattacks on municipal governments and school districts across the country, local officials are on high alert about the security of their computer systems.

There’s much more to Priscila Ortega than simply her status under a federal immigration program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, commonly known as DACA.

East End school superintendents will meet on Sept. 18 to discuss, among other things, sending a joint letter to the Suffolk County Board of Elections demanding that it stop using schools as polling sites.

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.

Michelle Taveras, Rob Rivera, and Alex Bates are East Hampton High School Bonackers in more than one way. They are East Hampton alumni, with Ms. Taveras and Mr. Rivera having graduated in 2011 and Ms. Bates in 2013 — and now, they have been hired as teachers in the school district.

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.

The Hampton Library in Bridgehampton will celebrate the end of summer and the conclusion of the summer reading club with a party on Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m.

The Sag Harbor School District may not move its prekindergarten classes to the new Sag Harbor Learning Center until mid-November because construction there is still underway, officials said Monday night.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.